“Lessons Learned From Closing My Remodeling Branch”

00:00
Aaron Horner
On the last episodes, we focused a lot on hiring and building a good team. But none of that matters if you don’t have the leadership skills and systems in place to lead everybody towards a unified vision. On today’s episode, I’m excited that we have Victor Lebegue of VL Builders. Today. He runs a successful and growing 3 million dollar design build remodeling business. But back in 2023, he actually had two branches to his company. And when he hit hard times, he had to decide which branch to close down and which one to continue and devote all of his effort. From this, he’s been able to reflect on the difference in culture between branches and how he was able to implement systems and different leadership strategies to turn the company around to the point of where it is today.

00:40
Aaron Horner
It’s very insightful for leadership of all levels. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

00:47
Logan Shinholser
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser and today I’m joined by Victor Lebegue, VL Builders. And we’re talking all about leadership, but something I am very excited about, which is going to be eos. So we’ll talk more about what that is, what it entails, but without further ado. Victor, we met first at Kyle Hunt’s Remodelers on the Rise conference this past year out in Ann Arbor. But what I would love is for you to kind of jump into like, your backstory. I know you had at 1.2 different companies that you were running, one in Minnesota, one in Colorado. So can you give us like the backstory of your business is and basically where you’re at right now, and then we’ll take that and we’ll dive deep into everything.

01:32
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, of course. Logan, thanks so much for having me on today. As he mentioned, I’m Victor Lebegue, CEO of VL Builders. I first started VL Builders back in 2018 in Minnesota. Kind of started it out of necessity. I had was in my early 20s, just bought my first house, got laid off from my nice corporate cushy job and had to fall back on making money so I could pay bills. So I relied on something that I knew, which was how to frame, how to, you know, do remodeling and things like that.

02:03
Victor Lebegue
I very much grew up in the construction world, so I had some contacts that I had networked with quite a bit as I was interested investment real estate as well at the time and convinced them to hire me to fix up some of their properties and Kind of grew from there into realizing that fixing, fix and flips was not what I wanted to do long term. So I started to dive into the wonderful world of design, build, remodel, and really just like learning everything I could. And ultimately grew VL builders in Minnesota to right around $3 million a year in revenue. And at that time I was also going through kind of some hardship in my life. I had just split up with my ex fiance at the time. I had a house that was torn down to the studs.

02:50
Victor Lebegue
And I really just needed to like change my life. And I was kind of looking for a change of scenery. Minnesota just wasn’t it for me anymore at that point in my life. And I had an opportunity come up. Where I had the opportunity to buy a business in Colorado that was an existing company. It had been around for about 14 years or so and decided to explore that opportunity into purchasing. And the general idea behind that was that if we had two companies doing $3 million in revenue and we had these office employees that were doing things like accounting, we could cross utilize those between two locations and effectively like reduce our overhead cost and still be a very profitable, self sufficient business.

03:37
Victor Lebegue
So I purchased the company integrity installations in 2022 and then effectively ended up shutting down my Minnesota location and just focusing on Colorado after about a year and a half.

03:51
Logan Shinholser
So why shut down the Minnesota one?

03:56
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, I know that sounds crazy because that’s my baby, right? It was the one that I started from scratch. I built everything there. And ultimately it came down to several factors. For one, we saw a big shift in the market in 2022 when interest rates spiked. We no longer had this excess, you know, excessive amounts of projects to do. We didn’t have excessive amounts of leads. Things were getting quite a bit harder to sell. People were taking longer to make buying decisions. And so ultimately, you know, part of it came down to revenue. But what made the choice clear for me was really the people that I had at each location and who deserved my time more and who really needed the most from me to be a long term successful company. That makes sense.

04:44
Logan Shinholser
And were you still living in Minnesota? Were you flying back and forth?

04:47
Victor Lebegue
No. So when I bought the Colorado company, I actually spent about four to five months stepping away from my company in Minnesota, just as kind of like a trial run to see how things would run without me around. And then I, when I bought the company here in Colorado, I fully moved here. Mostly because at that time the company was very much owner led. He was still the salesperson he was still the manager and just kind of handling all the day to day. And so I kind of took over that role when I came here to Colorado. And then during my management time with both of those companies, I was very much traveling back and forth to both, you know, Minnesota and Colorado.

05:27
Logan Shinholser
And when you say like the people in Colorado deserved more of your time, what do you mean by that?

05:33
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, so the company here really just had like great people. The previous owner really had like no construction knowledge. He was bad at managing people, he was bad at leading people, and there weren’t really any systems here. And when I came to Colorado, I could very much see a team of people who were hungry for leadership. They were hungry to grow. They were hungry for a way of doing business that was, you know, semi repeatable. Not that everything is in our custom world. And in my Minnesota location, I have good people who had been in the industry for a long time and were very knowledgeable, but they were not, they didn’t want it. You know, like, I could lead them to water all day long. But getting anything implemented, getting consistent with anything was very difficult unless I was micromanaging.

06:21
Victor Lebegue
I’m not here to be a micromanager long term.

06:24
Logan Shinholser
And when you talk about like they wanted the leadership, like, I know there’s, I mean, we’ve had it before at cgm. You know, I, I have a lot of friends that are business owners. They go, oh, I, I gave them, you know, it’s hard to say no to this person because they really want to lead or manager or be this responsible for this bigger, you know, function within the business. But ultimately, just because somebody says they want it, one, do they actually want it or is that just like the lie that everybody hears is that you have to be in leadership to make it happen. And then two, even if they do really want it and it’s true, maybe not the best fit, you know, maybe they’re not somebody that like, could actually be that good leader.

07:01
Logan Shinholser
So when you think about your team out in Colorado and you say they wanted it and they were hungry, how did you one identify that they were actually wanting it in Hungary than to figure out, okay, they actually have the ability to then step into those roles rather than simply just wanting it.

07:20
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, for sure. As you mentioned, people can tell you they want things all day long. I’m very much a believer that like, money isn’t a motivator. Like, we can’t motivate people. They have to very much motivate themselves. Most motivation comes from within and really, out here in Colorado, what it came down to is people ask questions. They wanted to know what the long term goal was, what the vision looked like for our future. And anytime we talked about implementing something, it wasn’t, you know, 15 discussions. It was, you know, two to three discussions of, like, how we want to do this thing. And then people actually taking action and doing. Wasn’t me sitting down, writing the process, saying, this is the process, this is how we’re going to do it. And then trying to spend eight to 12 months, like, reinforcing that process.

08:13
Victor Lebegue
It was very clear that they wanted structure and they wanted also a vision to see, okay, if I’m a carpenter here today, where can I be here five years from now? Or if I’m in project management, where can I be two years from now? And painting that picture of like, hey, if we all work together, we row in the same direction. This is what our company looks like. This is the structure. And here’s the roles that you can grow into.

08:40
Logan Shinholser
And how did you, like, tactically do that? Because I know, like, you know, I would, like, talk to my dad about, like, you know, he was really good at hiring people and I would ask him, like, what you do when it came to hiring. And I’m expecting like, these are the seven steps. But he would just say, like, the golden rule. Just treat people how you want to be treated. I’m like, that’s great. But like, I think I need more than that, dad. Like, I know that. So, like, with you, they, you know, it’s great to have people say, well, where could I be in five years? But also, as a business owner, that’s not always easy because you’re like, trying to figure out where yourself are going to be in five years.

09:12
Logan Shinholser
So let alone them, what did you actually then do as they’re asking these questions to make them feel certain that you actually have a plan?

09:21
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, I think that’s definitely a multifaceted process. Right. Going back to what your dad said, like, treating people the way they want to be treated is definitely a part of it. It’s funny, I’m rereading the book how to Win Friends and Influence People, and it very much talks about showing appreciation and genuine appreciation, not flattery. And I, I think that’s a big part for motivating people. But to get the big picture involved required buy in. And in order to get buy in, it couldn’t just be my vision. I think ultimately, if you have the right People on. On your team, you’ll find that the. They very much have the same vision you do. It just might be set a little bit differently.

10:00
Victor Lebegue
And so first was introducing EOS to our company and introducing what EOS is and why it’s important for us to have some formal structure to how we operate as a business. And then it was going through the implementation of that process. Even though I was running on EOS in Minnesota, it was getting the team bought into. This is the vision for. For Colorado. This is the vision for what they want. And collectively, as a team, putting that vision together, while, of course, leading them to a vision that I’m also happy with and want for our company as well. Once that team was bought in, everything else from there got infinitely easier. We were able to paint the picture of, okay, if we move to this revenue mark, we need this many people. These are the positions we need.

10:48
Victor Lebegue
And, you know, painting that picture three years, five years, 10 years out from now.

10:54
Logan Shinholser
So, just for everybody listening, EOS is entrepreneurial operating system. Basically. It’s a. It’s a. A methodology of how to run your business. We do it here at cgn. We actually hire somebody. You know, as we’re recording this podcast last week, the leadership team was gone for two days at Airbnb with our implementer that we, you know, bring in to then facilitate everything. So that’s what Victor’s talking about. But, Victor, my question to you is one of the big things in EOS is having the accountability chart and then having gwc, which is basically for those listening, if you’ve never done it before, GWC stands for get it, want it and capacity to have it. Meaning when it comes to their role, do they really get what the role is? Do they truly want it?

11:38
Logan Shinholser
And then the last thing is, do they actually have the capacity to do it? And I mean, like, capacity in the sense of maybe they want to be a salesperson, they get what it takes, but ultimately they’re just unbelievably introverted and they just can’t get out of their own head, and they just don’t have the capacity to be that gregarious salesperson. So that’s a huge part of what EOS is all about. So with you running EOS back in Minnesota, Victor, I know GWC is part of it. What was it about the Minnesota crew that you just thought, hey, this is just not. They’re not, you know, they’re not the right people. They’re not, like, hungry for this stuff. Even though, you know, you had EOs over there.

12:19
Logan Shinholser
And the whole point of EOS is to really get everybody rowing in the same direction as a whole.

12:24
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. Yeah. So going back to that, I think we didn’t have good hiring practices in Minnesota. And at that stage of our company, we focused a lot on capacity. And in an interview process where you’re only talking to someone once or twice and then making an offer and bringing them onto your company, you can’t really understand what motivates them or if they truly get it and want it. And I think a lot of my team up there had the capacity, and maybe some of them got it, but they didn’t want it. Right. And to me, want it means, like, get it is like, you understand the job wanted is like, doing the job right and doing it well and wanting more motivation, essentially. And capacity is the skill set to do the job.

13:13
Victor Lebegue
Whereas in Colorado, I maybe had people that didn’t have capacity, but I had people who really got it and really wanted it, and they showed that they wanted it, and I was able to teach capacity, or were able to grow those people into roles that maybe they didn’t have the capacity before, but we. We gave it to them. And so really, it just came down to, like, coming up with a hiring process that. That made a lot more sense to make sure we’re bringing the right people on from the beginning, which I think requires multiple steps, adding some stress to it, because just talking to someone doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a great fit for. For the team. A lot of people interview really well.

13:51
Victor Lebegue
They can tell you whatever they want, and then you get them down in front of, like, a disc test and maybe some quick assessments on. On their role, and they bomb it. We’ve had a lot of people do that. And so what I’ve found is that most of the time, we’re actually finding, like, unskilled people. Maybe not completely unskilled, but, you know, they’ve never done this specific role before, but they really get it and want it. And because they’re motivated, I’m able to teach them capacity a lot quicker and get them integrated into how we do business.

14:20
Logan Shinholser
So what was your hiring process in Minnesota compared to now in Colorado?

14:25
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, so when I first started, it was literally a single interview, you know, and then we’d make a decision, and then as. As we learned those lessons, because, quite honestly, I went through a lot of people in the. In the beginning days. It’s hard to attract good talent when you’re a small company and also when you don’t Understand the hiring process. It’s easy to say, okay, you’re a good fit, you’ve got the skill set, let’s, you know, bring you on tomorrow. Eventually we evolved into, you know, doing like a phone screen and then a single round interview process. And we would end up bringing people in that maybe had good capacity, but maybe they weren’t a culture fit with the rest of the team. And I realized, okay, we need people to also talk to the rest of our team.

15:10
Victor Lebegue
It needs to be a team decision, especially when we’re this small, because one bad apple can sink a ship really quickly. So now our hiring process is resume screening, phone screen, first round interview with the team. The team decides who they think is a good fit, and then it’s a final round interview with me, and then it’s followed by assessments. And really the assessments are important. We just went through this. We hired two brand new people at the start of this year and we had probably six great candidates and three of them got weeded out through our team’s interview process. And the top three ranged and experience. Some were very brand new to the industry and maybe had been working for two years in it.

15:50
Victor Lebegue
And one person in particular had been doing this for 25 years, had all the experience that ultimately we would want. And she did well on the interviews. But then it came down to the assessment piece and we found that maybe she’s not as much of a team player as she said based on the disc profile. And maybe she doesn’t solve problems as effectively as the other two. And so we ultimately decided not to hire that person and hire the other two.

16:17
Logan Shinholser
So when you say assessments, you mean more of like, behavioral assessments rather than like assessing are they a good carpenter or not?

16:23
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, yeah, it’s more behavioral. Like a disc profile or problem solving assessments, things like that. So we can just kind of understand how they might approach different positions. And then to take that even a step further, we can create assessments using, you know, things like test gorilla or any of those platforms out there. And typically you can also have your team take an assessment for that role based on what they think. And then you can review the candidates assessment and compare both assessments side by side and just see how that fits into the role.

16:56
Logan Shinholser
And then when it comes to the actual, like, skill set of the role itself, like, are you subbing, like, are you operating where like, you sub everything out and then you have a bunch of like. Or is everything in house?

17:07
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, we do 50. So we subcontract specialty trades and then we have carpenters in house who are just, you know, their roles vary as needed. Sometimes they’re doing demo framing mostly trim. Carpentry is like the primary role there. With carpenters specifically or field crew members, we take it even one step further and they have more of a physical assessment. I’ve found you can tell someone’s experience in about 30 minutes if you hand them a skill saw, have them cut a two by four, have them identify some fasteners. It’s insane how many people work in this industry and don’t understand what a galvanized nail is used for versus a bright coated nail. And then we also have them do things like cut a piece of crown and cope it just so we can see that general skill set.

17:52
Victor Lebegue
And it takes about 30 minutes and it gives us a good understanding of where they might fall in on the list.

17:59
Logan Shinholser
And let me ask, with that sort of skill set, are you doing that physical practical, if you will, at the end? Are you doing at the beginning? Because ultimately if they don’t know the difference between, you know, circular saw versus, you know, hacksaw, like, there’s no need to have a whole, you know, culture fit interview. So when you do that.

18:17
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, that’s fair. We actually do it at the end. But you, but you bring up a good point. It is however, pretty rare that a. It’s, it’s kind of rare for us to hire carpenters. Like the people that have been on our team have been here for quite a while. We’ve hired one over the last two years. But ultimately I think in the beginning it’s looking at their experience and talking to them. We can understand that knowledge base and as long as they’re on that playing field, then they advance into the interview process.

18:44
Logan Shinholser
Sure, yeah. Because I know we’ve like, for certain roles for us, like we would do the practical pretty much out of the gate of like, hey, this is such like a specialized thing that ultimately we could probably skip maybe three hours of interviews because we have like a four step interview process that’s like, it’s pretty long.

19:01
Victor Lebegue
Yeah.

19:01
Logan Shinholser
And we could save a lot of time if we just said, hey, build us this website. And they go to build the website and we’re like, oh, we don’t even need to have like a resume interview because like we’re good.

19:11
Victor Lebegue
So yeah, totally makes sense.

19:12
Logan Shinholser
Yeah. So we flip it sometimes. When you went into the Colorado organization or company and you said, all right guys, we’re doing this thing called eos, what was the initial gut reaction? Are they excited of, like, we finally have this thing that we can have vision? Are they frustrated because they’re like, I mean, nobody likes change management. What does that look like?

19:31
Victor Lebegue
It was a combination. I think some people were frustrated that helped us identify who maybe wasn’t the right fit for our company long term. So we did eventually end up letting some people go, or they, you know, figured out that they just weren’t a fit here and moved on to other things. We had some people who were excited or just kind of indifferent about it, but followed along and then saw as we implemented things, how much better things got. We were able to do things like increase our average job size, take on clientele that we really love to work for. And so they, as they saw those pieces start working together, they saw the improvement and now love running on it. At least I’d like to think they love running on it.

20:11
Logan Shinholser
And when you approach them, because I know one of the things you brought up was like, it’s not just my vision, it’s our vision. And I remember there’s a guy, Tommy Mello, I was listening to one of his stuff and he was talking about, like, you think as the visionary and the business owner that you’re going to go off into this cave over the weekend, come back with this, like, grand vision, and when you’re done telling everybody the vision, they’re going to clap, you know, they’re going to put you on your shoulders and like, walk out and everybody’s so pumped. But ultimately, every time I have done that historically, the first question I always get is like, well, where do I fit in on that? I’m like, did you not just hear what I said?

20:46
Logan Shinholser
Like, right, you should be thanking me for this vision. And they’re just like, yeah, I get that. Like, where am I fitting in? Like, how does. You know, I don’t really understand it. So I’ve learned the more that it’s then our vision, it’s a. It’s a big deal. However, a lot of people here have gone through a lot of iterations of this is just Logan’s vision. We’re just going to do it. And then eventually once we flipped it’s been a lot better. So when you came in and basically made it our vision, what did that look like in Yalls World, as far as how you’re approaching that with the team?

21:18
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it really started. I had to spend six months showing people that this business isn’t just for me. Like, I’M not here to get rich. So I had to do little things. I had to listen to people. I had to understand what they truly wanted. And then I had to show up as a leader, showing them that I’m capable of executing on the things that they want. To give an example, we had a lead carpenter who really just, like, wasn’t. I don’t think anyone ever showed him that they believed in him, right? And so he would show up kind of timid in a lot of meetings and things like that. And so I. I just spent a lot of time with him, showing him that, hey, I, like, believe in you.

22:06
Victor Lebegue
Like, you have this great skill set, and I think we can expand upon it, and you can ultimately be where you want to be. And now he’s a. A project manager for our company. And so we gave him training, we put him through the NARI lead carpenter course and just worked with him. There’s a lot of different examples I could go through on that. But just showing people that. That you believe in them and getting that buy in that, like, you’re there as a leader for them is, I think, step one and then step two is, you know, showing them what the system is that you’re operating your business on. It doesn’t necessarily have to be EOs, right? There’s tons of them out there and showing them that there is a roadmap for them on that vision. And not everyone needs that, right?

22:47
Victor Lebegue
Like, some people just want to show up to work every day and be in their seat and do it well and. And never really think about growing to another level. So it’s also a bit of identifying, like, who’s hungry for growth, who’s not hungry for growth, and making sure that you’re playing accordingly with. With each of those people.

23:05
Logan Shinholser
So with this specific lead carpenter, you put them through NARI’s lead carpenter program. I mean, that. That’s like a great, like, capacity to have it where maybe you get it and you want it, but you just don’t have the capacity to have it. But, But I know as an owner myself, a lot of times it’s tough where I’m like, yeah, are they not in that position because they don’t get it and they don’t want it? And if I put them through this course, we’re programmed basically, they’re. Maybe they’re going to figure it out. But also maybe. Maybe I just spent a bunch of money down somebody that ultimately is going to say, screw this. I’d rather just show up. You Know, clock in, clock out, and I’m done.

23:39
Logan Shinholser
How did you figure out with this specific person that like, they wanted more and they had the capacity to get there. They just needed basically the pathway to make it happen versus just going. I just think they’re, you know, a paycheck, not paycheck to paycheck, but just like a let me just show up, do my job and go home. And I don’t really want more out of it.

23:57
Victor Lebegue
Mm. Ultimately it was just having a one one discussion, which I think is also important. EOS teaches quarterly conversations, and I try to do that. It gets harder as you grow. Right. Like now I have three days worth of quarterly conversations that I have over the course of a quarter. But really just, yeah, getting that one one time, really understanding what that person wants long term and understanding if there is more that they want, seeing what they struggle with, if there’s areas that they want to improve and then other things too is like, in my opinion, people are motivated more off of feeling appreciated than they are by money. And so we have like an employee favorites list and it’s just like favorite candies, movies where could you max a credit card, things like that. And so I also give gifts intentionally.

24:47
Victor Lebegue
When I see someone that’s like doing the right thing, like it could be displaying one of our core values or it could be maybe nine times out of 10, they don’t add a daily log. And then the day they do, I like call them and say, hey, thank you so much for doing this daily log. It was great to see the progress on this project and the photos of the cabinets going in and just emphasizing that behavior that you essentially want to see out of them. And then ultimately I find that people just end up stepping up more to that.

25:16
Logan Shinholser
And when you’re going through this, I mean, a big part of EOS is visionary and integrator. So I know. I just like put a post out the other day because when we came back from our annual, you know, planning, I, I’m the visionary for cgn. I never thought of myself as the visionary. I always thought that was like, I felt cheesy saying I’m the visionary because I’m not Steve Jobs or, you know, like, it feels weird. Yeah, it feels super weird. But then when you actually like define what a visionary is, I mean, it was more about like bad tendencies that make you visionary. I’m like, oh, that is exactly me. Like, scope creep is my jam. Like, let’s do it. So that was like my thing. But I Have an integrator that like, I’m able to then fall back on.

25:59
Logan Shinholser
And I like, it’s been a big journey between Ally and I figuring out where is that line in the sand? Am I just going, hey, we’re going to hit 10 million in 10 years. You figure it all out. My vision’s done. I’m going to go out and do my own thing. And then you integrate. Like, how do you, like, do you have an integrator or are you divisionary integrator? Like, what does that look like?

26:18
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. So I currently sit as both the visionary and integrator. I did have an integrator when I had my Minnesota location and she was ultimately one of the reasons I also decided to shut my Minnesota location down. She was the wrong person for the seat long term. And currently. So I said, like, you have the test that you can take through eos on if you’re more visionary or integrator. I sit almost dead center and that eventually I would like to have an integrator because I also have very much big visionary tendencies. Like, I think we can do 10 million tomorrow and this is all we need to do. And, you know, so I have to derail myself and pull myself back. But each member on my team is essentially an integrator in their own sense. Right.

27:08
Victor Lebegue
Like, so I have Ann, who is our brand and operations director, that started off as an executive assistant for me, and we worked very heavily and very closely together for like two years straight on integrating a process and sops and things like that in the company. And so I was also having to get comfortable throughout that time with like, things don’t have to be done exactly how I want it. Actually. A great point. I was just at Case Architects and Remodelers last week and they say a lot creative people need creative freedom to do creative things. And I had to stop analyzing every single part of how we do something and realize that people need creative freedom to be able to move and work the way they want to. We need guardrails and gates for things to pass through.

27:59
Victor Lebegue
And so it took a lot of self reflection and self work also to just be able to step back and let. Let people integrate things for us, if that makes sense.

28:09
Logan Shinholser
It. It does. Yeah. I know cases like, they’re super dialed in. I was, I just finished this podcast series that was basically Pixar’s growth and Ed Catmull and like, you know, he then went to Disney Animations and went in and basically said it’s not a product issue. It’s a culture issue. And that like your executives that don’t, they’ve never made a movie themselves are basically saying you need to change the whole storyline because we think this is going to sell more and that’s why you keep having flops. So his whole thing was he left Pixar to go do the Disney animation stuff and basically it was a culture issue and the whole thing was around give everybody the box.

28:46
Logan Shinholser
But ultimately what happens in the box, you know, they would have, God, it’s like they would have this creative council or something along those lines where they would go and hang out and just be able to chat about ideas without having the oversight of C Suite there to listen to the ideas and go, hey, before you go to that pathway, that’s dumb. We’re not going to do that. So it very much was all about like the guard rails and making sure everybody stayed within them. However, you give free reign within those guard rails to make your stuff happen.

29:16
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, yeah, I, I think that’s so important.

29:20
Logan Shinholser
Did you have that in Minnesota? Like when you think about the guardrails and letting people do their thing, was that not there? And that was part of the issue?

29:31
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, that’s a great point. I do believe that maybe was part of the issue. My expectations on how we did things were here and I constantly felt like everyone was meeting me here. And a big part of that was the processes and systems we had were too complex. It was a step by step checklist on every single thing that needed to happen. And so when I bought the Colorado company, I naively thought, right, like, we have all these great systems and processes, we can just go ahead and immediately implement these. And then I got here and I started trying to like, teach process and realized it was way too complex, way too complicated.

30:10
Victor Lebegue
And that’s why we ultimately, after we shut Minnesota down, spent the next two and a half years really just kind of scaling back and focusing on culture and then also focusing on engineering a system where to some fault, like some people have to follow the parts of the process that they might not want to follow, but also giving more creative freedom to allow people to do things in the manner that they want to. And right now we’re at a small size where everyone kind of has to do their part so everybody here can do their job.

30:42
Victor Lebegue
But as we grow, the goal is like, I don’t care how you do a sales presentation, do it in the style that you want to, as long as you’re selling clients and you’re taking care of them in the way that we want to have them taken care of. You. You’re allowed to do what you want in that process, you know, so we’ll. We’ll start backing reigns off as we go.

31:03
Logan Shinholser
When you think about the integrator in Minnesota, and the reason I keep harping, like, the Minnesota stuff is it’s great to hear about the good stuff, but it’s also like, the identification of this is why it didn’t work as well. So it’s like the opposite of this. What was it about that integrator? Maybe not them specifically, but just like, in general. Was it the wrong person for the role? Was it the right person for the role? But you were the wrong visionary at the time? Like, what caused it to be such a friction point that you said, I’m just shutting this whole company down?

31:33
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, core values. It all came down to core values. So when I was in Minnesota and I was working with Banta Grader on a daily basis, she showed up much differently than when I wasn’t there to see everything. And so when I came to Colorado, I eventually started, you know, getting phone calls about problems that were happening. And then I would go to Minnesota and I would try to see how things were operating. And while I was around, things were operating well. And eventually I started taking some of my employees aside and. And after having, you know, hours of conversations, they would finally tell me, well, she did this thing, and it was like she scolded an employee and called him names that you should never really call someone in front of everybody.

32:20
Victor Lebegue
And, you know, one thing that good leaders do is they don’t scold in front of people. It really demoralizes someone. She would watch TV at work during the day. And so the team ultimately, like, their morale started to plummet because they didn’t have someone who was leading them effectively, didn’t really seem to care about them, wasn’t appreciative, and all these things. And so ultimately, it just came down to a core values fit. And I ended up letting her go well before I shut down the Minnesota location. And the sad reality is I knew, I. I knew deep down she wasn’t a good fit for her for long term. Like, before I came to Colorado, I knew I was going to have a problem with her.

33:02
Victor Lebegue
I just didn’t feel like we had the bandwidth, and I wasn’t at the size where I could just immediately go out and hire, like, a good general manager per se or anything like that.

33:11
Logan Shinholser
And now looking at Colorado, so you’re basically the same Size, revenue wise, as you were in Minnesota, in Colorado.

33:18
Victor Lebegue
Correct, correct.

33:20
Logan Shinholser
So what is the pathway in your mind to find that next integrator or ops manager, knowing what you know about Minnesota?

33:29
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. Realistically, we’re going to focus on growing from within. I’m heavily a big proponent of promoting from within anytime we can. And now like going on next year, my average employee here will have been here for four to five years. So they very much understand the company, they understand the vision, they understand EOs. And I believe we have a couple on our team that would be very happy to stand into an integrator relationship. Secondly, I’m here to build a company long term that doesn’t necessarily just revolve around me and my leadership. And so I believe we’re going to approach a path of having a semi employee owned company. I’m not quite sure what that structure looks like. And so it’ll be more than a leadership team of one or an integrator of one. It’ll be more of like a board.

34:25
Logan Shinholser
Interesting. So why that approach compared to doing just this single integrator which is kind of EOS to a T?

34:33
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. I think that each of our areas of business are very different than something like a McDonald’s or a factory floor. And I think even if you have a good leadership team, I believe that the people that are like the head of production or the head of sales and marketing and design and things like that will very much be more passionate about integrating things into those departments and coming up with ideas that also involve their team.

35:04
Logan Shinholser
Got it. And then when you think about the leadership team, like that’s a big part of like over here we have, you know, visionary integrator, client success, ops, you know, like all those different like seats together.

35:17
Victor Lebegue
Yeah.

35:18
Logan Shinholser
How do you look at your, you know, for a design builder, modeling company, what does that leadership team look like? Like who actually sits on that team? Let’s say cast it out three years where you’ve got that full team built out. What are the roles?

35:32
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, so we would have an operations manager, a finance director, and Ann, who’s currently on our brand and operations director. We call her operations director, but it’s not in the way people think. She’s more focused on like systems and IT and like software and stuff like that. So it would for sure be those three people. And you know, if we’re lucky to be at the size, we’ll also have someone who’s the head of sales and design as well.

35:59
Logan Shinholser
So you combine design sales together?

36:02
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, yeah. Currently we do we’re just not at a revenue level where I, where we can separate it out yet. That is the, probably the five year path for us though.

36:11
Logan Shinholser
And when you do all this stuff, I mean, I like the whole, like everybody talks about work, all in the business, not in the business. And like, I, you know, I kind of find that to be played out to a certain extent. But it’s like super true. I mean, it’s just, it is what, you know, how much time are you spending, like thinking about the metrics and the vision and like where the team is going and because all the stuff that you, at the beginning that you’re talking about of like, you know, where would you max out a credit? Like all this stuff as you’re saying. And I’m just thinking like, God, thank God I got Ally. Because like this is, that is not my personal wheelhouse.

36:44
Logan Shinholser
Like, I’m very good at the exact visionary stuff, but the, if you put out a really good website or like a client has really good result, I will see that and I will like highlight it publicly. But as far as like, hey, I saw that you just got a new puppy. Like that. That’s just not my natural thing anyway. So, like, how much time are you spending thinking about all the little things that make a big difference in the business?

37:10
Victor Lebegue
Logan, it sounds like you and I are wired very similarly. I’m also not.

37:15
Logan Shinholser
I just say I’m just like, oh, I’m not a dog person. But I’m also like, honestly, unless you’re talking about like design, build, remodeling, marketing, like we don’t have that much to talk about. Like it’s a very specific niche that I can go on all day long.

37:26
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, I’m very much wired the same way. Even in my friend groups, it’s like we can talk about business all day long. I can’t talk about football and whatever.

37:32
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I got nothing.

37:33
Victor Lebegue
Like, I don’t care. Yeah, well, thinking about the business as a daily practice, in a sense, I try to carve some time out though I do follow clarity breaks, so. It’s funny actually, after this recording, I have the next half of the day to just go do a clarity break and think about, okay, what’s working well, what’s not, what do we need to fix what don’t we. That role is changing for me almost on a daily basis. I stepped out of sales about a year ago, but I was still involved because we only had one salesperson. And you know, they only have so much Capacity. And so I was just filling gaps wherever we could.

38:09
Victor Lebegue
So as our teams expanded, I am purposely creating my role to step out of the business more and more because we’ve gotten to a point where I’m getting in the way of things more often than not. And that’s not because I suck at it or I can’t do it. It’s because I have to have my oversight on the whole business as a whole and steer us towards the vision. And so I’m not just thinking about my client and sales. I’m thinking about marketing eight months down the line and where our pipeline’s at and where consumer confidence is right now. I’m thinking about the types of projects we want to do and how production, if they have the capacity or not, is able to meet the demand of our workload.

38:52
Victor Lebegue
And because I’m thinking more and more about those things, I’m just not able to follow our process well for bringing a client in. And as it sits right now, I’m just mostly focused on training, building culture, thinking about the business mission, vision, and values, and really just trying to implement those and push those any way I can.

39:13
Logan Shinholser
Talk to me a bit about the clarity break. What is it? What are you doing during it? What’s the cadence look like?

39:18
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, I do a very low pressure clarity break. The goal is to literally just take a notepad, sit down somewhere that’s not your office, not your house. I usually go to a coffee shop or a restaurant and maybe just grab lunch or something like that. And I don’t have an agenda. I’m not there to meet any expectation. I’m just there to think. And whatever comes to my mind is the things that I’m thinking about and writing down and thinking through. And then as that thought, as those thoughts come through, I’m trying to pick, okay, what are the top one to three things that are, like, in our way at this moment and what are we going to do about them and how are we going to approach that?

40:01
Logan Shinholser
And how did you like? For me, I know I’m supposed to do clarity breaks. I suck at them because, like, they’re just not. I’d rather just sit down and build something or, like, go meddle in somebody else’s department and bug them. Because I’m like, oh, you know what’s better than a clarity break is me giving my two cents on the website, like, flow. When in reality they’re like, Logan, like, you’re just. You’re messing stuff up. So, yeah. How did you come to prioritize Taking the time to sit down and actually have thinking time.

40:28
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, it’s new to me. I’ve. I’ve tried to do clarity breaks for a while, and I. I have done them, but I haven’t done them consistently up until more recently. And really, it just came to sitting down at the beginning of the year and putting it on my calendar and holding myself to having that appointment. And secondly, you. You just said something that’s really important. Logan, you’re muddling stuff up. I had to start listening to my team and. And understand that, like, I don’t need to be involved in every conversation. It’s nice to. Because it makes you feel needed and wanted and important. Right. And a lot of us are motivated by feeling important, but I often will, you know, bring in 2 cents. That probably doesn’t make sense or they would have figured out themselves anyway. So it’s.

41:13
Victor Lebegue
It’s really just kind of a waste of my time, and I’m not serving my team in the best capacity by. By involving myself in those things.

41:20
Logan Shinholser
Yeah. I look at it like, with me, it’s like golf, where it’s like one out of four shots is, like, great. So I’m like, oh, I’ll just keep swinging. Like, that’s what. That’s what the team wants. They want me to keep going. But it’s like one out of four ideas hit, but the other three basically change the process enough that everybody has to relearn how to do stuff. So now if there’s a client that’s like, hey, I want you on my account, I’m like, you don’t. I’m like, I’m behind the scenes. I will see everything. Trust me. But if I step in, ultimately, I will delay the project. I will then come back and go, hey, I have all this new stuff that I think you should add. It’s going to cost way more.

41:55
Logan Shinholser
And then you’re going, well, that wasn’t part of the deal, you know, so I’m very good. Like, my. My paper plate award for our company was Scope Creep Instigator, where if I step in, it’s. Then I’ve made more work for everybody, and ultimately nobody wins.

42:12
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. And you probably not to think of it like a business, but to think of it like a business, you probably made less money on that, too.

42:18
Logan Shinholser
Way less.

42:19
Victor Lebegue
Yeah.

42:20
Logan Shinholser
Yeah. Way less. I mean, there’s a. There’s a guy who’s been like, the agency space. He’s big on, like, operations, and basically he said every time you change your offer or what. What specifically you’re giving out the team that spent all this time building out all these systems and processes. You’re now changing how to approach it. So now they have to figure out what is the right way to do it, how do we rebuild everything. And basically, I mean, our job is hard enough where it’s like we’re just trying to keep up with what Google is changing, you know, two dozen times a day, let alone now Logan is changing stuff two dozen times a day. And it’s just, there’s no benefit to it.

42:55
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, I think as you grow, Logan, I don’t know about your start story, but I started with 500 bucks in a tool belt and I also had a very difficult childhood. Everything relied on me for self sufficiency, for my safety, to meet my needs, whatever it was. And as I grew, I also was very much like that. Like I need to decide what this process is. And same thing. I would have 50 million ideas in a week and we would try, you know, 15 of them.

43:29
Victor Lebegue
And it got to a point where people were like, we need to just like establish something, you know, and so it takes a lot of like inner work and just like looking within yourself too to figure out where we’re not best serving our company and our people and really taking a step back and being comfortable with like things aren’t going to necessarily always go the way we want them to, but that’s how our team learns and gets better. And even if I told them that, it’s like telling your girlfriend some advice and then she calls her dad and her dad gives her the same advice or whatever. You know, sometimes your team needs to figure it out the hard way. Sometimes they will listen to you. You kind of have to figure out when to pick those battles.

44:11
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, that was in that post that I made about the EOS stuff was like somebody asked like is there a value in hiring an implementer? And I was like, honestly we’ve tried self implementing this thing for years and do I wish I would have hired somebody years ago? 100%. Do I think I was at a place where I had lived in the pain enough of starting and stopping where I would have forked out the money for it at the time? No, I think I had to get frustrated enough to say screw it, I’m just going to put my, the money where my mouth is and hire somebody. And then that was when all this stuff stick.

44:46
Logan Shinholser
I mean, it’s why, you know, I met you at, you know, Remodeling business coaches conference where it’s like people are putting their money where their mouth is and actually like hiring people to help, you know, them do the stuff that they want to do. So it took. Took me a while, but I, I finally got it.

45:01
Victor Lebegue
Yeah. Yeah, it takes a long, a lot of hard lessons to learn that one lesson.

45:06
Logan Shinholser
So let me ask you to wrap all this stuff up so you’re a big EOS person. A lot of this stuff is all predicated around like, you know, when you think about like having an exec team and doing all these things, like you, you’re thinking like, oh, if I’m as big as Case, then it makes sense because I’ve got, you know, a ton of people and a lot of like, ability to like, let people be creative because I have great people on the team. But ultimately it’s the chicken or the egg. Like I can let them be creative if I had good people on the team, but I got to have enough money.

45:33
Logan Shinholser
So it’s like, you know, it never works out in alignment with all that said, if you around like that, like where you are right now, you know, you’re doing a couple million bucks a year and you’re trying to grow this thing. Are there like a couple EOS tools that you would suggest people listening to start with that would really help them think through? Are they on the right path? Do they have the right people? Whatever it is, like you know the system well enough, what would you suggest people start with?

46:00
Victor Lebegue
Yeah, I do think the number one thing is the VTO having the vision Traction Organizer. You know, it paints your mission, vision values. It gives you an opportunity to create a 1 year, 3 year and 10 year plan for the organization. I think that’s the number one thing people want to plan. You know, they might not say it, but they want to plan. They want to know a direction, they want to know where we’re going when we post our job descriptions now for hiring, that plan is very much in there. And when I ask candidates like, what made you decide to want to interview with us? They said they almost always say you have a vision. And the companies I’ve worked at don’t have a vision or a plan. And they don’t, they might not care so much what the vision is.

46:45
Victor Lebegue
They just want to know that there’s a direction. So the VTO would be the number one thing for me. The second I would probably pick the people analyzer because your people are your culture. And just going back to we’re not McDonald’s. At least, at least in the custom design build, remodeling. And I know this might not fit everyone listening to this podcast. Not every single thing we can do can be easily repeatable. You need good people to make the system work and if you don’t figure out that problem, you’re going to. You’re going to bang your head against the wall for a long time.

47:21
Logan Shinholser
Cool.

47:22
Victor Lebegue
Love it.

47:22
Logan Shinholser
So VTO and people Analyzer.

47:26
Victor Lebegue
Yeah.

47:26
Logan Shinholser
Cool. Well Victor, this was awesome. I like nerding out over eos and it’s cool to do it with somebody else in like a different industry to understand like what does your accountability chart look like and you know, how do you define metrics? So yeah, this was awesome man. Well I appreciate it. Super cool to come on talk about your old company coming in. I would say my biggest takeaway around this stuff with this specifically is really listening to how you’re approaching it with a smaller team where you don’t have a major leadership team but you sitting in both the visionary and the integrator seat. But then honestly tying that clarity break back into it because that’s ultimately your time to specifically think about that long term vision.

48:08
Logan Shinholser
Because I’d imagine when you’re in the day to day of it all, it’s much easier to be that integrator rather than divisionary. So to actually like build that in to your overall day, like I imagine most everybody listening to this is not doing that and that’s awesome. So that’s cool. Thank you very much man.

48:24
Victor Lebegue
Thanks Logan. I appreciate it.

48:26
Logan Shinholser
Cool.