10 ways baseball teaches benchmarking for construction companies

Many construction contractors want to get an idea of where they stand in comparison to the competition or industry benchmarks, but they’re not sure where to begin. This week, we’re discussing some benchmarking lessons from a source you may not have considered: baseball. Listen to learn what baseball teaches us about measuring success, analyzing losses, scouting players, and more.

Topics we cover in this episode include:

• Statistics
• Reviewing the game tape
• Setting Goals
• Analyzing losses
• Measuring Success
• Player scouting
• Performance incentives
• Pitcher selection
• Competition scouting
• Hitting strategy

LINKS

Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.

Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube.

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contractor-success-forum

FIND US ONLINE
Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | McWins.com
Rob Williams, Profit Strategist | IronGateESS.com

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Rob Williams: Welcome to the Contractor Success Forum. Today we are talking about 10 ways baseball teaches benchmarking for construction companies. And it’s exciting.

And who we have with us Here we have Wade Carpenter with Carpenter and Company CPAs, and Stephen Brown with McDaniel Whitley Bonding and insurance agency, and I’m Rob Williams Iron Gate Entrepreneurial Support Systems. And the two of us are broadcasting here from McDaniel Whitley bonding–

[00:00:35] Stephen Brown: live!

[00:00:36] Rob Williams: –And insurance agency live. Right, because I locked myself out of my office. Okay. We don’t have to tell that part, but yeah. Talking about that. And I happen to be across the street. You guys now know that we’re neighbors. Yes. We’re from, we’re from Memphis guys.

[00:00:51] Stephen Brown: Alright. Alright. Tell us Wade about this fabulous topic that you’ve come up with for today’s–

[00:00:58] Wade Carpenter: One of the things that people ask me all the time, how am I doing? They wanna know how they’re stacked up against the competition or whatever. And it’s something that I felt like we needed to talk about, and maybe I was gonna do a little deeper dive at some point on this, but I started thinking about how can we compare this to what we’re doing and, and how to make some strategy around what we’re doing. And I came up with this 10 ways and I think Rob and I were on some same page because we started also thinking about the movie Moneyball.

[00:01:34] Stephen Brown: Yeah, that’s Brad Pitt thing. And Moneyball, and I actually admit I haven’t read the book. I need to read the book too. But a great follow up to this is watch that movie. It’s a pretty, pretty good movie too, but it just blew my mind at how people can be looking at one thing for so long and not have the right facts.

These baseball guys were recruiting on what they knew was right for decades and decades and decades, because they were the owners. And if you looked at the numbers, those were not what was winning ballgames.

[00:02:08] Wade Carpenter: Right, right. Well, they, it, it’s a fascinating story to somebody like me that’s into numbers and stuff like that. But, statistics are everywhere. And I started thinking about a lot of these things Sometimes they’ll apply to basketball or football, professional football.

But there’s a lot of things that professional sports teams do looking at these benchmarks, and I think there’s a lot of correlations between construction and what they’re doing, and so I just kinda wanted to chat about about those today.

[00:02:37] Stephen Brown: Well, all contractors want to hit a home run with the big change order, but go ahead.

Statistics

[00:02:43] Wade Carpenter: Okay. Well, the first one I wanted to throw out there was the statistics. I mean there’s statistics all throughout baseball. It’s probably one of the heaviest in statistics out there. But, against the competitor or how the industry is doing is one of the common things as I already said.

And you can take a look at it and look at the competition’s strengths and weaknesses, but they wanna know, are we building a healthy company? And so, how do we do that? A lot of times you can’t find the financial performance of your competitors, but there are some industry statistics we can talk about.

Any of them y’all wanna bring up or, I’ve got a few of them I want to throw out there.

[00:03:23] Stephen Brown: Yeah, the first thing that pops into my head is FMI group that produces industry-wide statistics for construction companies. And then there’s also bonding companies who I represent as a bonding agent benchmarking key ratios. We’ve had some good talks about that in the past.

How to analyze that and what that means.

That just reminded me, I was thinking about how you as the bonding company and Brad Pitt on the number side, I’ve thought about how much you’re like Brad Pitt, and it really just in looks more than anything. It really is. It probably is that Brad Pitt, they probably think you’re Brad Pitt as they’re, as we’re watching this.

But yeah. Wow. You number guys, come on. You’re embarrassing me. I know I’m a humble guy and but you’re exactly right about that in the looks department. So what else? What else Wade? Yeah.

[00:04:10] Wade Carpenter: Well, from, from other industry statistics, some of the common ones are like the, used to be the Robert Morris, I think his Risk Management Association puts out statement studies every year and they, the bankers compile these all over the country. They have some straight for construction and then they have the ones in the back that are percentage of completion based, which are actually come from the CFMA: so Construction Financial Management Association, which I know you guys are familiar with. CFMA actually publishes some great statistics a little more in depth than what they give to, I don’t know what they do to provide that to RMA but there’s also one called Biz Miner that looks at what the tax returns show on these construction companies. And some of that is somewhat limited, but a lot of those are, great ways to find some data to find out how you’re doing.

[00:05:07] Stephen Brown: ENR Magazine has every week the construction cost data for your area. Southeast, Northeast.

[00:05:16] Wade Carpenter: Right. And just also, if you have specific trade organizations you’re in, a lot of times they’ll compile their own statistics. So, it depends on the type of construction you do. But there is resources out there to find this stuff. So–

[00:05:32] Stephen Brown: Thinking about what statistics would apply to my profession and how many contractors I’ve had that haven’t defaulted on a bond, but that hasn’t to do with my performance.

[00:05:42] Wade Carpenter: Hopefully that’s not a—

[00:05:43] Stephen Brown: Dive into this Wade.

Game tape

[00:05:45] Wade Carpenter: Okay. Well, like I said, the number two, when we say game tape, you know that that’s very common in football. People review the game tape, but if you look at like professional baseball, they have scores of people behind the scenes looking at their competition and how they’re doing, and is this pitcher how they’re doing, or if they’re in a slump or those kind of things.

[00:06:05] Stephen Brown: Yeah, just, just, just the number of calls that the ump made wrong. That’s a statistic, you know. No, no, seriously, there’s the box and every pitch that’s out of that cube from a computer standpoint is how many missed calls umpire has made, but you’re right. It’s like Monday morning quarterbacking, but better.

You’re going back and analyzing not only what your players did, but what the other team’s done.

Oh, yeah. Having that scoreboard, that scoreboard up there, but a major statistics scoreboard, not just the scoreboard on the wall during the game, but those game tapes.

[00:06:42] Wade Carpenter: Well, thinking about it from a construction standpoint, it’s, it’s very easy to, well, sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not. But you, a lot of times people in the same industry know what the other company is doing. And so studying your competitors, their operational processes, their strategies, are they trying to be the low bidder, those kind of things.

I think there’s a lot that you can learn from that by analyzing what your competitor’s doing.

[00:07:07] Stephen Brown: Yeah. Well, I think that’s really important. There’s, like you were talking about statistics, DBOT. Days build on time, that could be a construction statistic. And then going back and seeing how you played the game, what you liked about it, and what you didn’t like about it. And then a lot of things contractors don’t do is they don’t use their historical bidding data and their review of that game plan. And communicate it with the entire organization so they can replay that game and win.

Right, right, right. Yeah. And we’ve got that, that just brought up the idea of the leading and the lagging indicator so people can go back. We don’t need to get into discussion today. But we just had that a few episodes ago to make sure you’ve got that. Most of what we see and we’re talking about are the lagging indicators after something’s already happened, but you have the leading indicators that gives you an idea of while you’re in the game, you know what can happen before you get those final financials from Wade where you can see what the lagging indicator is beforehand.

[00:08:14] Wade Carpenter: Right.

Goals

[00:08:15] Wade Carpenter: Well, the next one I wanted to throw out there is setting goals and things like that. In baseball it may be like, Hey, we want to be within past second place, past all-star breaker or something like that. It gives us something to shoot for. Setting targets for the construction company is the same kind of thing. What do we need to do to improve our profitability, our margin this quarter? Those kind of things.

[00:08:37] Stephen Brown: Right. Or as broad as what do we need to do to be the best so-and-so trade or general contractor In the city of blank, right?

And having those goals written down in some sort of format. I just came from a three day coaching conference with Verne Harnish and the Scaling Up coaches, and we have a survey that you’ll put out to your team and you ask them independently what the goals are. And typically nobody puts the same answer down. So you get that goal and it is the owner’s job to decide, these are the goals. I’m running this ship. It’s the goals that this is what we’re gonna do. But he get that feedback from everybody else, but then share it. Everybody has their own opinion and it’s amazing how often the owners or everybody else just thinks they’re all on the same page. Mm-hmm. But if you write that down in secret, it’s amazing. Even a team that feels like they’re together, they’re not on the same goal, they don’t have that same goal. So write those down, communicate it, communicate frequently, often, often. And we call it the big hairy audacious goal in the bhag. Used to be a different a, but we’ll say audacious now. But the in getting that down and then you have the long, that’s your longer term, and then get your shorter term goals from three to five years to one year to quarterly to, even if you can break it down by weekly goals and goals within each department. But that can take you a long time to get that whole system going. But get those main goals and communicate it. Don’t keep it a secret from the guys working for you.

Right, don’t it in. Yes. Don’t keep it in. Okay. Let it out. Let it out. Share it. Share it. Well, it’s hard for some people to do and you, I say, well, how do I do that? Well, you might literally have a Monday morning quarterbacking meeting.

Yeah.

Where you’re analyzing the bids from the previous week. You may definitely do it with your project managers, but it’s good to bring everyone in the loop too.

Yeah.

Understand what your goals are. Yeah. And, and whatever that is, just, this is not what this episode’s about, but have that rhythm to where you share those goals. It doesn’t matter which I, well, maybe it matters, but it, I don’t think it matters exactly which rhythm you’re going to use, but have a rhythm and have that going, whether, I know scaling up, you have the daily huddle. The weekly meeting, a monthly and a quarterly. So just something that fits you and your group and which type goals to share with what, but sharing the goals, having the goals is really important. But I think even more important is sharing the goals.

Yeah. And I probably jumped ahead on the Monday morning quarterbacking wave, because that

[00:11:10] Wade Carpenter: Well, no, you’ve led perfectly into my next topic actually.

Analyzing Losses

[00:11:14] Wade Carpenter: But yeah, the next one is like analyzing losses. If you watch, your sports newscast or whatever, whether it’s baseball, basketball or whatever, what we could have done different. We’re saying, well, we didn’t play as a team tonight, or, we need to work on our pitching or whatever it is.

Analyzing losses to improve future performance. That’s something that we can all learn and it translates to construction. Again, when you have a loss job, that’s one of the more acute things, hey, something’s gone wrong here, and that’s a perfect time to identify some areas for improvement, make changes to operations, strategies so that these things don’t happen again.

Does that make sense?

[00:11:58] Stephen Brown: Mm-hmm. And I would say if you don’t have a management team you want to do that with, feel free to do that with your bonding agent who always has a good ear. Can’t talk specifically about your competitors of course, but you know, you’ve got the losses of I didn’t get the bid, and then you’ve got your losses, I didn’t make my profit on the job.

Success measurement

[00:12:17] Wade Carpenter: Right. Well, I guess the next one too, I’d bring up using benchmarking in baseball, it’s measuring whether they’re winning or losing. The success measurement. And they do that based on performance against their competitors. But you know, what we’re doing in construction, maybe we’re comparing ourselves to the industry for financial purposes or the operational metrics and, some of them may be due to the industry. Some of them may be like your internal, like, how many employees do we have? Do we have too many or are we billing on time, as you said, stuff like that. So, any thoughts on that?

[00:12:56] Stephen Brown: So you have success measurements, things like that that we’ve sort of already talked about. But I keep thinking more and more about the leading versus lagging indicators. So on the lagging indicators, that’s what we’re normally looking at. What is our profit? What is it? But what is something you can think of when we’re looking at a success? What’s a short term success that we feel leads to that number that we really want?

So finding those small successes with the leading, maybe it’s some kind of daily activity or something that happens in the construction progress for the day, or the number of invoices you turn in. Just something that, every company I’ve noticed has so many different things. There’s some basic tenants that we all share as construction companies, but we always have those successes, get those small successes and they will build up to the large successes.

And then be like the money ball game. Make sure those small leading indicators actually lead to that, because how many times if we had something, we think we’re doing something right and then boom, that lagging, that real reward at the end didn’t happen even though we thought we were doing things right from what we believe was the correct thing to do. So gotta go back and look at it again.

[00:14:13] Wade Carpenter: Right.

[00:14:14] Stephen Brown: Unexpected cost. Oh yeah. You

[00:14:18] Wade Carpenter: Okay.

[00:14:19] Stephen Brown: Unexpected delay, those lagging indicators like you were talking about Rob. And, what I was thinking about Wade is, in baseball you have different measuring statistics for different positions. You got the, pitchers, batters, infield.

[00:14:33] Wade Carpenter: On base.

[00:14:35] Stephen Brown: Yeah. Everybody’s got their own statistics and what we’re seeing is construction companies, you can measure what your goal statistics are for making your numbers, and then you might want to think about those statistics for each individual player. What kind of statistics would a project manager have? Well, it’s bringing the job in on time, bringing the job in on profit, and a minor statistic that would make the the field office very happy is the project manager had a data turned in on time for billing purposes, data and billing.

So there’s project managers–

[00:15:08] Wade Carpenter: You’re reading my mind.

[00:15:09] Stephen Brown: Okay. Sorry. Sorry.

That’s good. That’s good. Stephen, that just reminded me, we, the biggest thing we bring, we come down to is having a number where every employee can tell you whether he had a good day or not from that. It’s hard to get to that point, but that’s your goal, is to bring it down on those statistics.

So every day, did I have a good day? Every single worker that you’ve got, so.

[00:15:34] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. Well, Stephen was leading right into the next one I had.

Performance Incentives

[00:15:38] Wade Carpenter: Performance incentives. In baseball, a lot of times they will give players bonuses if they hit so many home runs or whatever. But you know, a lot of times in construction, exactly what Stephen was going into, it’s like, well, sometimes there’s bonuses if you bring the project in on time, but sometimes we can use these benchmarks to hold people accountable.

Because exactly what you said, or I don’t know where you were going with it, but you know, I’ve seen problems where project managers don’t get their bills in on time, so they have to wait another month to get their cash flow. That can be detrimental to a construction company.

[00:16:18] Stephen Brown: As a owner, should you keep score of this sort of thing internally? It seems to me like if you had that data when you were calling in a project manager, you can say you’re not hitting your averages here. I understand some of them were beyond your control, but let’s talk about it so it won’t happen again. Otherwise it’s gonna hurt your average, your batting average.

[00:16:38] Wade Carpenter: And may hurt your salary. Exactly.

So again, whether they get a raise or, get to move up in the organization, those kind of things.

[00:16:47] Stephen Brown: Yeah, well, you have those and there’s so many different scoreboards now with the technology, I’m not gonna recommend one over the other, other than have one. There’s so many options you can have from having your own spreadsheets to many products, but everybody can bring that, that goes to the owner. But the incentive system, how many times have we paid people and had that incentive system for your bonuses that you realize it didn’t actually give you the results? I’d say like for me and my history is 90 something percent of the time what, what we were paying and what we were rewarding on.

Even back in the eighties, in seventies, eighties, nineties, we had formulas. We didn’t just give a bonus, we had a formula, then we would look at it, but so often our formulas were not correct. And I can think of the biggest one of a guy that was gonna get, I hope he, he may be listening, but anyway, love you. If you’re listening. He comes back to the seventies, he’s retiring. Yeah, that’s right.

Actually he’s done, he’s still working. He’s in commercial construction, but he was getting a huge hundreds of thousands of dollars bonus because we were putting our land development cost into costs. So he’s building the houses. And he was getting a huge bonus because we just had the land in, we should have had it in at market value.

So he was getting something for was, it wasn’t his performance. So look at these things. Right. He, he was getting the, what, what we’d say that lagging indicator of the profit that we were wanting. Mm-hmm. But it, it wasn’t fair. But how many people were on the opposite end of that, that were doing a great job, but we had it reversed the other way where there was nothing they could do about it?

I gotcha. So, so work hard on this. And that’s one way to lose your best employees too, is if you don’t have those things set up right. So not, not that we want to encourage the bad thing, but be careful on these because they can backfire.

[00:18:36] Wade Carpenter: Right.

[00:18:37] Stephen Brown: I was just gonna say, you were talking about scoreboard. I think of it more of a dashboard.

Mm-hmm.

You’ve got all those gauges telling you how your engine is performing, whether it’s overheating, whether you have enough gas whether you’re going too fast or going too slow. Your dashboard shows you a lot of things, your check engine light, and I was, I was just wondering what that dashboard would look like for a contractor.

[00:19:01] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, well actually that was a topic for another day that I planned to maybe kick around because you need to have the benchmark before you can build a dashboard. So there you go. Leading into something else for me. So you just reading my mind.

[00:19:15] Stephen Brown: That’s great.

Pitcher selection

[00:19:16] Wade Carpenter: The next one that I wanted to kick around was pitcher selection. You got the bases loaded and the home run hitter is coming up. A lot of times they’re gonna go to the bullpen and change out their pitcher. Maybe he’s a righty and they wanna put in a lefty or a righty against him. Or maybe one pitcher is stronger against another one.

[00:19:32] Stephen Brown: You may have a project manager that’s a good closer and close that–

[00:19:35] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, exactly. Yep. So again, in, in construction, I relate that to like decision making. You don’t necessarily wanna, well, you could swap in and out project managers, but you know what, what I’m thinking more of is your suppliers, your vendors, who you’re working with. Partners on these things. Evaluating them like your suppliers. Do they get the job done on time? Are you getting subs that get the job done on time and on budget? Those are the things that I think about when, maybe you should consider whether having performance measures where are these people really meeting what we need to do and helping my long-term goal?

[00:20:17] Stephen Brown: Yeah. No, I like the fact that you brought that out of, the pitchers being the project manager, but evaluating everyone, your material suppliers, your vendors your general contractor, your subs. And I like the idea of having some kind of his statistics or historical data about their performance.

[00:20:36] Wade Carpenter: Right.

[00:20:37] Stephen Brown: How do they affect your ability to properly bid a job with the right profit in it? How many times did you use their bids if you were their subcontractors? And then afterwards, how did they perform on the jobs that they did?

And for contractors, you’ve got, from a bonding standpoint, the key statistics we have is, is did you estimate a profit on the job? Not how much profit, but did you estimate a profit? And make your goals? Or did you have profit fades? And if you had profit fades, why? Why? Well, the key indicator is your work in progress report.

Then also another indicator that’s most important from us to look for is do you have enough cash? Working capital? And that’s a key indicator for us. And net worth of the company. And all these indicators, some of them are more important than others.

[00:21:34] Wade Carpenter: Right.

[00:21:35] Stephen Brown: Yep. It’s interesting because we think with this pitcher selection used to be, was this person’s superintendent, maybe a, from that job part, was he, they, most of ours came from a trade. A lot of them were trim carpenters beforehand. That seemed to be an overall guy. They did a great job, but some of them were painters, some of them were different things, but they learn everything and finding those numbers. I actually like what y’all are talking about better because I usually, that’s actually a false indicator. They have experience in one thing, which you might need that experience to bring that picture in for, maybe it’s a medical facility or something, but, but we found out that that’s not usually true. A lot of it is personality type and just the way that they can run and supervise a job. But bringing in that pitcher is, is the right job.

And we’re talking superintendents, but they’re estimators and they’re different things for different– now estimating I have really been messed up. That’s probably where it’s hurt me. The worst is having an estimator that didn’t know that aspect and they miss some line items. So anyway, that’s getting very specific. But yeah, bring in the right pitcher.

Well, no, I think pitcher selection has got us thinking off base of who is the pitcher. Yeah, yeah. General manager or that’d be the construction company owner, right? Yeah. Well it could be. Yeah. And the pitcher is the one that wins games. Yeah. So, But that could be anyone. And, but you know, how, how do you look for and analyze the non pitchers?

[00:23:08] Wade Carpenter: Right. And you also may want to think about it from this like, who are you working for? Who are the owners? Or what industry, are you working on the right things? And I think that’s what Rob’s book’s about is, or partly about, is are you picking the right jobs?

[00:23:22] Stephen Brown: Right?

Yeah. Pick your ideal client, who do you want to work with, and then what is special about you? And do those line up? Mm-hmm. And then can you systematize that where it’s not, you as the owner, you’re not the one that performs the whole thing so you can grow. So yeah, getting all the, getting that in there, that’s, that’s your sweet spot. Thank you for the plug on the Pumpkin Plan. Mm-hmm.

Competition Scouting

[00:23:44] Wade Carpenter: Just a couple more of these. Again, you’re scouting for players, but then you’re also scouting competition. And you don’t necessarily know exactly how they’re doing certain things, but you know, you may know their operational performance measures, things like that. But you also may be thinking like, is their strategy we’re gonna come in at the lowest bid? Are we gonna come in? I, I’ve used the model on here before, like the bath fitters model. Are we trying to get in and out or are we targeting a certain type of construction? Analyzing yourself against the competition. And some people, a lot of times they will try to imitate somebody else, but if they can find an area of the market that they don’t need to imitate, somebody’s not out there. And that’s probably what Rob’s talking about in his book is, things like that, that identifying those areas where they can differentiate themselves can make a lot of difference in their profit.

[00:24:40] Stephen Brown: Yeah, and embrace your competition. Just like a great baseball team would wanna play another great baseball team to gauge how they’re doing. Your best competitors are the best ones to scrutinize. And usually they can be your friends. There’s certain rules in construction like baseball, and if you’re a contractor, you know what those rules are. And it’s being fair and being professional. And you’ve got a competitor that’s doing that and beating you, then you admire the fact that they did it and you wanna know how. And by being friends with your competitors, getting along, at least being cordial, you’re gonna find that out. But it’s the right thing to do because they might need your help and you may need their help.

Short of anti-trust laws, right?

Right, right. Yeah. No, no. Colluding here. There’s no bid. I’m not talking about bid rigging. Right, right, right. No, this stuff here, no, competition scouting. You can also say who is bidding this and who’s getting the work and also what competition do I have that might have their plates full right now? You know, and I might have a better chance of getting this job because we know about the size of their company and they’re max out. Boy, I think you just hit it for right now. Being relevant for right now. That could be a whole episode in itself of, of competition. How busy are they? And, and like you mentioned, Stephen, I got, I took a breath minute.

Steve, you can get back in the screen drinking some coffee. Okay. The But, but having that with all these jobs coming out in the, the capacity and so hard to find labor right now. Boy, that is a, you just really hit it on the head right there, Stephen. Well, I hit a, a grand slam home run with that one Rob, you’re exactly right.

[00:26:25] Rob Williams: Brad, was that Brad? Oh, no, no. You’re Stephen. I thought you were Brad fit there for a minute. Me, Brad.

[00:26:29] Stephen Brown: I am the hefty Brad Pitts, they call me in. All right Wade hitting strategy.

Hitting Strategy

[00:26:35] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. Last one I was gonna throw out there. A lot of times they will swap out a pinch hitter sometimes in baseball, if maybe somebody’s. You got a righty pitcher and you wanna battle lefty or whatever against it. In construction it’s adjusting the strategies based on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

Maybe they’re going in for the lowest price, but maybe you want to try to go the quality model. It’s well, yeah, you’re, you could use these guys, but they have a lot of warranty work and a lot of problems with their construction and it’s how you position yourself. So that’s what I was going for with the hitting strategy.

[00:27:15] Stephen Brown: Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I always tell the young agents here at McDaniel Whitley starting out, don’t assume that you’re the best at what you do. You can always work harder and there’s always someone that can work harder than you and take this account away from you. In construction, working harder is a quality product on time and a happy owner, and that just breeds success.

[00:27:39] Wade Carpenter: Right.

[00:27:40] Stephen Brown: Every single time. So you can bank on that. You can say, oh, no, Stephen, I disagree with you. Hey, hey, quality construction and done on time is is not that important. But remember who your customer is and remember where your pride comes from and where the pride of the Yankees, the pride of your team. What is that? What do you do the best? What are you most proud of, and how did you celebrate that? With each other. Well, way. This is just huge. And, and next week’s contract success form, we’re gonna use bowling. No, I’m kidding. No, no. Bowling’s. Well, you know, some some alleys are greased up more than others too– Okay.

Well, no, we’re not go, we’re not, we’re not going there. But I think this was a great topic, Rob. Great. It was good. It was nice to, would you like a breath mint? I forgot it being in person. I think I backed you up. I, I had one in the middle of the show. No, we’re good. Not used to the, the, the in-person. This is pretty neat. Well,

[00:28:37] Wade Carpenter: Well, I hope this is kinda like, at least may our listeners think about what’s out there in benchmarking and what they, ways they can use benchmarking data.

[00:28:47] Stephen Brown: Yeah. And did you know that there is one statistic in baseball that only one person has ever done? Tell us. Tell us Brad. Stephen.

Well, that is an unassisted triple play from the outfield.

Very impressive. Explain to me what that is. I, I don’t understand. A guy named Walter Carlisle in 1908 outfielder and a former circus acrobat. So when he’d catch the ball, sometimes he’d throw a summer salt into it and stuff. But he caught the ball, ran, there was runner on first and second. He caught the ball in the outfield, ran to second, tagged him out into the guy on first. It’s never been done before. Unbelievable. He also had an unassisted infield, triple play in his career. Very impressive. Very impressive. Anyway, I digress, guys.

[00:29:35] Wade Carpenter: That

[00:29:36] Stephen Brown: Yeah. Well.

I don’t know, but I know that that contractors out there think about these statistics. Think about your performance.

[00:29:45] Rob Williams: Do that and put the, the biggest thing that we didn’t even mention today, which is the reason I got into Profit First, was because of the benchmarking of that. I looked at it as a benchmarking. So that’s a whole nother show we’ve discussed, again, that we refer to so many things that we can talk about in here. But having those benchmarks for your different. Different parts of your your cash and your profitability. So those are huge, huge points. We could talk all day.

[00:30:10] Stephen Brown: So well, listeners, we’re whipping ourselves into a frenzy, but more importantly we hope we whipped you into a frenzy to think about baseball and these 10 ways that baseball teaches you benchmarking.

[00:30:23] Rob Williams: That’s right. So here on the contractor success form, do we have anything else for today?

[00:30:30] Wade Carpenter: no, I think that was it. Let me wrap us up, Rob.

[00:30:33] Stephen Brown: All right, well, great. Well, here we are in the Contractor Success Forum with Wade Carpenter, Carpenter in company CPAs, and live from the McDaniel Whitley Bonding and Insurance Agency Studios here with Stephen Brown. And I’m Rob Williams from across the street at Iron Gate. So, thanks a lot and come back and see us again.