Five controls to prevent fraud in construction firms
Even on a team that you trust, theft and fraud sadly occur too often when a company doesn’t have the right internal controls in place. This week, we’re sharing the top five controls you can begin implementing today to protect your business and yourself.
Topics we cover in this episode include:
- Common warning signs of theft or fraud
- Segregate duties related to financials
- Regularly review your financial statements
- Require employees to take time off
- Consider hiring an outside controller
- Implement controls on financial decisions
- How Profit First can help
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Rob Williams, Profit Strategist | IronGateESS.com
Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | McWins.com
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Rob Williams: Welcome to the Contractor Success Forum. Today we are discussing five controls to prevent construction fraud in your contracting business. With us today we have Wade Carpenter with Carpenter and Company, CPAs. And we have Stephen Brown, McDaniel-Whitley Bonding and Insurance Agency. And I’m Rob Williams with IronGate Entrepreneurial support Systems.
So today on the Contractor Success Forum, which is your MBA for the construction business, we love that. We had one of our listeners give us that feedback, getting their MBA right here. You don’t get a like diploma. Maybe we could send him a diploma. I don’t think it would be worth a lot. But you can listen right here and it’s amazing what you can get out of this show.
So, what is it guys? We have two experts. We got Wade here talking about it, and Stephen, both of you guys have got a lot of great experience in this topic.
[00:01:03] Wade Carpenter: I know we could probably do several episodes on this and you know, for today’s discussion I really wanted to really focus on the internal part. You know, our bankers are telling us all these stories about wire fraud and bank fraud in the construction. I’m seeing it with my clients. But today let’s talk about internal. We’re gonna throw out some controls and things like that to help minimize that, but this is by far not an exhaustive list. Just some things to think about.
Insurance policies to protect against fraud
[00:01:31] Stephen Brown: Wade I think it’s a great topic, and I used to be a bond underwriter. We wrote a lot of what was called fidelity bonds or employee dishonesty bonds, which are really an insurance policy, not a bond. But employee dishonesty, it’s also called crime coverage. You can buy that insurance from your insurance agent.
But as a rule of thumb, we were always taught that the folks that steal from you internally are the folks that can steal from you They’re usually the people you trust most. But then again, you know, I have an example of bigger companies, of a woman that came to work and she was accounts payable clerk and literally invented a side folder for licensing permits for projects, and she would charge small bogus fees over and over again to all these projects. Ended up getting $380,000. And it turned out that her drug dealer taught her how to do this.
Okay, so you hired a druggie that you didn’t test to come in and they set up this system and they stole this money from you. The good news, there was this crime coverage in place and the insurance policy paid for it. And then they went after her and everyone else.
But in order to get that insurance, Wade, you have to have some internal controls in place or they won’t write it. For example, do you have dual signature on checks? And it’s interesting for our listeners to know too, that accountants, usually on an audit, will put a management letter that addresses the internal controls of the company right there on the front page beside the cover page on an audit. So Wade, you deal with this all the time.
Audits don’t always uncover fraud
[00:03:24] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. A lot of times I’ll get a call, somebody thinks something’s going on or something, they want an audit and they have absolutely no idea what an audit really is supposed to be.
And they think that if you do an audit, you’re gonna find anything and everything that possibly, you know, somebody could have stolen from you or all kind of stuff. Well, quite frankly, that’s not the purpose of an audit. And you know, if you’ve got suspicions of that, you probably want to engage more of a forensic type accountant that’s doing that.
But unless the auditor is put on notice that there could be possibly some issues, they’re not gonna be looking specifically for somebody stealing something or whatever. And the responsibility is not there unless there is some specific mention of something like that. That’s not the purpose.
But, you know, we get calls all the time saying, I want an audit. And they really have no idea. Somebody gets mad at somebody or somebody leaves and they think something’s going on. And auditing is an expensive and very detailed process, so I just wanted to kind of mention that up front.
[00:04:34] Rob Williams: Yeah, most of my audits were just annual required audits. And I got so much out of it when I got bonding Stephen, with you, because they did put those controls in place and I don’t know if it just happened in the early two thousands that they started requiring it. I know the price of my audit went way up when they started getting those longer things, but I still use what I learned out of those audits with the companies I work with now. A lot of the controls that Wade will talk about maybe in a second.
[00:05:01] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. But before we get into that, there’s five things that I wanna kind of mention that, you know, may increase the potential for theft or fraud internally.
Don’t give employees the opportunity to steal
[00:05:11] Wade Carpenter: The first one is the opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Now, I know this is not necessarily most contractors, but just in the case of you’re a cash business, if you could leave cash sitting around it’s very easy to take it. That’s a simple example there, but, you know, we gotta address the opportunity.
And you can’t always avoid that. You know, there are other things like people will rationalize things like, hey, they’re making so much money and I work hard. I work all day night and I deserve this. I’ve worked for them for 20 years.
And they may be dealing with– and actually I got a call from one of my contractors last week that we do the outsourced back office stuff for, and he asked me to pay particular attention to some things because his office manager is going through a divorce and she’s strapped for money. And so that’s another thing, financial pressure. Maybe they’re strapped for funds.
And again, the capability, you know, having the knowledge or the access to bank accounts or whatever. The access and knowledge to do things like that. So we can talk about some of those things where we can mitigate that.
[00:06:26] Stephen Brown: Now that’s a really good point. You’re not condoning their behavior, but there’s just certain situations that come up that might facilitate a honest person to steal from you. And usually those are the people that you trust the most, aren’t they, Wade?
[00:06:42] Wade Carpenter: Absolutely. And you know, over 30 plus years of me doing this, I’ve seen several things where, you know, it may not be the– had one situation many years ago, I’ll never forget. A lady was in an auto accident and, you know, she probably would’ve never done anything like that, but she had some things going on in her life and she needed money and she was desperate.
And so you can’t always assume that the person you trust the most is, I mean, there may be things beyond their control, and so.
[00:07:16] Stephen Brown: I had a situation for a masonry contractor years ago, and sweet little old lady was the bookkeeper, receptionist, everything with his company. And she had been with him for years. Literally gray haired lady with orthopedic shoes, just the way I’m describing it. And she was fooling around with a cocaine dealer, much younger.
Who was you know, rocking her world and she was stealing to give him money, whatever he wanted. And she stole over a half a million dollars. It didn’t take that long for her to be caught, and she had been with him for 30 years and my contractor did not file charges against her. He informed the FBI to go after the drug dealer who disappeared, of course.
[00:08:05] Wade Carpenter: Yep.
[00:08:06] Rob Williams: Don’t forget, people can also be under duress. You know, I’ve had situations, well, not with me, but elsewhere where they maybe threatened a family member if they didn’t do some things or even, some larger companies I’ve heard of kidnappings and things like that. So don’t judge the character and also don’t put the person in the position.
That’s the conversation I’ve had with my employees a lot of times was like, I just don’t want to put you in the position, one, to be blamed for it. I’ve had people step up and they want some authority and it’s like, you’re being put in a position where you may not even do it, but somebody else might take it, and then you’re gonna get the blame for it if you have this authority. So by us putting these controls, it’s not that we don’t trust you, we’re trying to protect you from any false claim or just put in a position maybe somebody knows about that and they could blackmail them or put them in a duress or bring their gosh horrible situation, bring their family under duress for something like that. Don’t put anything over on these drug dealers and things like that, that just, their brains are not there anymore. They’re just anything that will work.
[00:09:13] Wade Carpenter: Yep.
[00:09:14] Rob Williams: Anyway.
[00:09:15] Wade Carpenter: Before we kind of get into the controls, let’s talk about a couple of other things that may be going on in your construction company, ways you may be able to spot some of these things, fraud going on in your business.
Number one, I see often that when stuff like this comes up and you start looking at transactions and you can’t find the backup, magically that’s disappeared, those missing documents, that can be a red flag. Rob, you’re smiling there. I–
[00:09:41] Rob Williams: Oh, I’m, I’m laughing. The first theft thing that I remember, I was about 23 or 24, and I remember my assistant, I said, well get this credit card bill. There’s a page missing out of the credit card bill. You know, I don’t guess he thought I looked at them. And then they’d order another one, then that page was missing again. And order another, and then he quit.
And so it finally turns out there were all these charges down at Beale Street and all these bars and stuff on my credit card. I think he had a big time out where if he’d been honest with me, I probably would’ve let him pay me back. You know, first I had to make sure it wasn’t me.
[00:10:16] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:10:16] Rob Williams: Check my calendar.
[00:10:18] Wade Carpenter: The second one I was gonna bring up, multiple payments to the same vendor. And you know, sometimes that happens, but I had a situation about 15 years ago where an HVAC contractor, he had a bunch of credit cards. And there was payments to, I can’t even remember, you know, MasterCard or, you know, I don’t even remember.
Some of them were gas cards. Well, what the bookkeeper was doing, was paying her own credit cards with it. But there was so many of them and the owner was not paying attention. And actually I had another situation where it was actually a roofing gutter type contractor where we worked for the father but the daughter-in-law was keeping the books. Well, she started writing checks and we were one of the vendors that supposedly was getting paid all this money. And so it’s, oh, well wait a minute, let’s look at the check here because that was not made out to us. And lo and behold, it was made out to the daughter-in-law.
It’s amazing, those kind of things.
[00:11:13] Rob Williams: Oh wow. Yeah, I guess you have but when you’re do manual checks, you can write the check on one name and then in the computer it’s got a different name on it.
[00:11:21] Wade Carpenter: Yep. Well, all you have to do is enter it in your QuickBooks there and you know, most people are not gonna go back and check to the bank statement, those kind of things.
[00:11:32] Rob Williams: Boy that’s an easy one. Yeah.
[00:11:34] Wade Carpenter: Just a couple of other ones you know, looking at your invoice volume, if they all of a sudden start going up and more money’s going out than is normal and your top line volume hasn’t changed relative to– you know, that can be also a red flag. When your bookkeeper has a lot of adjusting entries to your cash, your credit card or something like that, instead of putting the actual transactions in, well, they can make the Excuse, Well, I didn’t wanna take all the time to do it.
Well, that could be another sign of hiding something that’s going on.
[00:12:07] Stephen Brown: Mmm.
[00:12:08] Wade Carpenter: We don’t see this a lot too, but unexplained reductions in, say, material inventory. I’ve got a hot water boiler contractor. They keep all this stuff on their truck and all this stuff started disappearing. They didn’t have good controls on that. Lo and behold, this guy was actually doing work for other people, using the actual, he created his own invoices, but they also said, you know, the company name. So they said, well, you gotta cut us a check, stuff like that. Well, the material started missing.
[00:12:39] Stephen Brown: Also project managers that are ordering more materials than are needed on the job, and they’re literally stealing-
[00:12:48] Wade Carpenter: Yep.
[00:12:49] Stephen Brown: -that Isn’t needed. Unfortunately, I’ve seen That happen a number of times.
[00:12:53] Rob Williams: Yeah. I remember when they came out with the database for serial numbers for heat and air units for us, we started writing them down. I guess this was in the eighties or nineties, maybe 1990s. We are. We used to get so many air units stolen, and then the police came back to us and they said, You know what?
We started notice when we’re seeing the same serial numbers over and over again. The heat and air guys, before we had our own company, they were stealing our own units and then reinstalling them back on our own houses with the same serial numbers again.
[00:13:26] Stephen Brown: Whoa. Whoa.
[00:13:28] Wade Carpenter: That’s pretty brave.
[00:13:30] Stephen Brown: That’s
[00:13:30] Rob Williams: You know, it was, I don’t know where he was getting because it’s a big reputable, they’re still in business now, you know, around Memphis. He was a great big heat and air company,
[00:13:39] Stephen Brown: Well, you need to out them, Rob. That’s horrible, man.
[00:13:43] Rob Williams: I know it was amazing. I got to know the owner like a decade or two later and I just kept thinking that in my back of my mind. I was like, how did that happen? Or who was purchasing? Or did the owner do this? I just had a hard time believing it was him because I knew him and so it’s amazing what will happen.
Segregation of duties
[00:14:01] Wade Carpenter: I had a couple other ways to spot fraud, but I think we probably need to move on to some of the controls. One of the hardest things to do in any company, I don’t care how big you are or small, especially with audits and stuff like that, typically we have to put this note on there, lack of segregation of duties.
You need to have multiple people doing parts of the job so that they can’t do that. And when you have a small office, that’s sometimes tough. And I know Stephen, you were talking about that earlier.
[00:14:31] Stephen Brown: Well, you just, you do not have someone deposit checks that also reconciles your bank account. Even if you have one person shop, you’ve got to reconcile the bank account, sorry. Or hire someone else. But there needs to be a segregation of duties there. That’s one thing.
[00:14:51] Wade Carpenter: Absolutely.
[00:14:51] Rob Williams: Yeah, that was a really big thing for me. The people that were doing the accounts payable and then the people that were writing the purchase orders and stuff, being in separate. We were large enough to have, they literally were in separate rooms of multiple people, but most of these smaller companies, it’s the same person. But I think that was one of the very first things pointed out to me when I had split off. We had sold the big company and I had a smaller home building company. They were pointing out, you know, these need to be separate. Even if you need to outsource some of these things.
And I think we did that. We started outsourcing some of our bookkeeping and things like that so the onsite superintendent or assistants could be ordering and everything, and then somebody else was reconciling and paying the bills.
Regular review of your financial statements
[00:15:37] Wade Carpenter: The next one I was gonna bring it up, just regular review of just your financial statements. Sometimes you get too close to it. You know, you get tunnel vision but, or don’t know how to read them properly. But if you start looking at fluctuations in time, a lot of times you can spot these things.
Just the owner reviewing stuff like that. Every now and then, go in and pick up the bank statement and look at it. Pick up the credit card statement and you know, you’d be surprised what you can catch.
[00:16:06] Rob Williams: Yeah, that was one great tip that you guys gave me, or the CPAs did. They said, mail your bank statements to your house. So I started doing them and I’d open them and we had thick bank statements back in the days of the factory. There’d be so many transactions, so I couldn’t read them on If I did, I couldn’t tell what they were, but just the fact that I opened it and put it there and brought them, it looked like I was looking at it, even though honestly I couldn’t tell what it was with all those pages of stuff that had to be reconciled. But I think it really helped.
[00:16:37] Wade Carpenter: All 30 years of doing this and my earlier years was, especially as an audit grunt, they didn’t have all these online bank stuff, you know. We would have copies and we caught people doctoring the copies of the bank statements before. It’s just, it was kind of crazy.
[00:16:55] Rob Williams: Well, you know, that’s a great point. Do people even get their bank statements anymore? All my stuff’s online. I don’t really use that.
[00:17:02] Wade Carpenter: Right. But you know, again, there’s ways around you know, our checking that kind of stuff.
Require employees to take time off
[00:17:08] Wade Carpenter: One of the things that we were talking about earlier, requiring employees to take time off. You got your bookkeeper and they never take a vacation. Stephen, I think you were mentioning something like from the insurance
[00:17:20] Stephen Brown: Here’s the logic behind that, Wade. From an underwriting standpoint, you ask that they require that your key employees that manage your accounting and other key areas of your business take a vacation of ten consecutive days. These days, people working from home or taking a little vacation here or there.
We’re talking about one of your key employees taking 10 days. That might sound crazy, but in 10 days, if they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul within the organization and they’re juggling the books, that’s when it comes crashing down. So you find somebody that’s been stealing from you can’t manipulate things anymore and then all the lies are exposed.
So requiring that is just like shining light on whatever dark deed that they’re doing.
[00:18:12] Rob Williams: And not to mention the extra benefit you get because in our management systems work that we do, we say, you know, take a four week vacation or something, is trying to see that all your systems and things in are in place for your company to be able to operate if something catastrophic were to happen to somebody.. Or you just do continuation processes, especially you as the owner being able to come out of there. So yeah.
Yeah.
Consider hiring an outside controller
[00:18:38] Wade Carpenter: One other thought I had, hiring an outside controller. It’s amazing. We actually have a situation going on right now where we’ve taken over from a very large general contractor and The people that were doing the books are incredibly guarded and they didn’t want to turn over things.
And now we’re kind of discovering things that are, were not done right. And you know, I don’t wanna say anymore right now, but it’s amazing when you have somebody outside as well as, you know, when we’ve been brought in before. People will, they’ll kind of straighten up their act. Let’s just say it that way.
And if nothing else, sometimes it, it puts people on notice that, hey, I could get caught doing something. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have an outside eye on your books, or a CFO or something like that where they don’t have access to all the stuff and they can spot things like that.
[00:19:33] Rob Williams: Yeah, that’s a really great point. And our theft prevention measures, our dummy cameras were more effective than our real cameras. Just the fact that it gets somebody to straighten their own act up. Just the fact that they believe they’re being watched. It can cause people to fix themselves.
It’s that control. Because some people know how to do it. And even if it’s not theft, just clean up the sloppiness that maybe they just didn’t discipline themselves to do. They need that push.
[00:20:01] Stephen Brown: I remember my uncle was chaining a John boat to a tree, and it was a real small, lightweight chain with a teeny tiny lock. And I said that’s not gonna stop anyone from stealing your John boat. And he said yeah, that’ll keep the honest vote from stealing my John boat.
[00:20:19] Rob Williams: Yeah. Right.
[00:20:21] Stephen Brown: In other words, it’s just like reminding neighbors, I’m not throwing this John boat away. Don’t help yourself to it.
[00:20:27] Rob Williams: Good point. Good point.
Having controls on financial decisions
[00:20:30] Wade Carpenter: Again, there’s several things we could talk about here, but just having controls on major and even minor financial decisions. You know, there are people out there that give project managers credit cards or these debit cards. There’s some great products out there for contractors right now where they can require a second view before they’re approved or you can lock them down from your smartphone. And if they need to go make a decision, you can be talking to the supplier right then before you give them that option.
So there’s a lot of controls you can put in place from the big decisions to the small decisions. And use technology when you can.
[00:21:09] Stephen Brown: Sure. I know for example, American Express you can get alerts if one of your employees is using that card for purchases that you might want to be aware of. And also letting them know he should be using this card in Waco, Texas, or wherever the project is.
[00:21:27] Rob Williams: I had a superintendent right before he left me, I guess he didn’t know that I was gonna know he went to Atlanta. So he went to the Home Depot in Atlanta. He was working a job in Arkansas, so I guess he thought that maybe we’d think it was fraudulent. Went and charged $10,000 of tools at the Home Depot, I guess, so he could start his business when he left me the next month. Thought we couldn’t track him down.
So we were like, yep, guys, we did it. I think he had to show an ID or something. It was just real blatant. It wasn’t real smart, but it was very obvious who did it. But yeah, you get those charges.
How Profit First can help prevent theft
[00:22:01] Rob Williams: You know but I had one more point. Profit First has been a big thing for me to see this when we have all the bank accounts, when you see a really big, large account, say there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in that bank account, it seems very easy to take something, It won’t be noticed. But when you segregate those down into smaller chunks, it seems a lot harder to steal and be noticed in a $15,000 account.
We will probably be more likely to notice it when we have those bank accounts segmented down like that for their particular purpose because you, you can see the variances and notice them, but, also like that fake camera, the fact that it’s a smaller account, the people there will think they’re being watched more carefully too.
[00:22:46] Stephen Brown: And lots of small amounts add up.
They really do. And you don’t just get caught because you’re greedy. There has to be a separation of oversight to catch these folks.
[00:22:59] Rob Williams: Yeah. You’re not gonna notice a $3,000 variance in a $300,000 account, but you’re gonna notice it in a $15,000 account.
[00:23:08] Wade Carpenter: Yeah that’s actually a great point. That’s another thing that the small plates idea and it’s amazing what you see and feel when those plates get tight. You know, we did a recent episode about what happens when you come up short, have more expenses. And once you’re established in Profit First you’re gonna notice any significant fluctuation in those bank accounts. So, great point, Rob.
[00:23:31] Rob Williams: Yeah.
[00:23:32] Stephen Brown: Wade, what about checks? Joint control or counter signature, dual signatures on checks?
[00:23:38] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, there’s a lot things out there right now that, you know, dual signatures are great. They’re–
[00:23:44] Stephen Brown: But a lot of times checks have to go out and both owners aren’t around to sign them.
[00:23:48] Wade Carpenter: There are basically, people call them different things, but you tell the bank that we paid these people this amount, and if it comes in for a different amount or it comes in for a different payee, I call them imprest accounts. You can do that and it can significantly cut down on fraud.
[00:24:06] Rob Williams: Yeah. A lot of people that, those dual signature accounts, they’re just like, man, this is such a pain. It’s so difficult. People wanna avoid it for that. And it’s, it’s a legitimate thing. We had that in one of my companies and my office staff wanting to be the efficient one, they figured out how to make it easy. So it was great. They just ordered a stamp with my signature on. And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Hold on a minute. And I mean they were so proud of themselves for figuring this out too. I was like, no, do not do that. That is not that’s not the point.
[00:24:39] Wade Carpenter: Well, again, there are some controls out there that there weren’t out there, you know, 10, 15 years ago even now. Talk to your banker about some of those things too. They may be able to help from the bank side.
[00:24:49] Rob Williams: You know, Wade, I’m actually curious about this. I know I rarely write checks anymore. I’ve got a couple of vendors that I write checks to, but most everything now for me is is a transfer, you know, a payment somehow.
Where are we going with that? How many checks are out there these days?
[00:25:06] Wade Carpenter: The volume’s going way down and there’s one particular bank that works with a lot of contractors that they’ll do the ACHs for free. And it’s a lot faster way to get paid and you know exactly who it’s going through, as well as some of these systems where well, you want the subcontractor to give you a W-9 so you can give them a 1099, well, you have to upload it before you can get paid. You know, there are some great systems that do that.
[00:25:32] Rob Williams: So do you feel these are more secure or less secure than the checks?
[00:25:36] Wade Carpenter: They should be more secure. Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:25:40] Rob Williams: Oh, I guess, yeah, it’s a good point. Like what we talked about earlier where you have one thing written on the check is the name and then a different one entered in the computer. I guess you couldn’t do. Or you might be able to, but it’d be difficult, I guess, to do that on the computer, on a electronic transfer.
[00:25:56] Wade Carpenter: I guess I should qualify my statement in saying that, you know, it would be more secure as long as you’ve got control and know who’s sending out those ACHs.
[00:26:06] Rob Williams: Yeah. Cause I, I think a lot of people feel more secure with the physical check still, especially we older people. But that’s probably not true. It might actually be– what was that hand raised?
[00:26:16] Stephen Brown: You’re talking about older people, I just raised my hand. But guys also, when we talk about internal theft and fraud, you know, there’s inventory that has to be monitored. That’s another headache that you have when you have inventory left over from a job that you wanna use on other jobs.
And also we talk about external fraud. We did a podcast on cyber crime. Remember that guys?
[00:26:42] Rob Williams: Scary.
[00:26:44] Stephen Brown: Well. Point is there are internal controls that you can put in place that make it a lot harder for people to steal from you.
We had a, it was kind of funny. It’s not really funny, but it is funny. Down in Louisiana, one of my customers, they were down there on a job and one of the foreman on the job said, my daughter, Is in the hospital in Atlanta, I got to go. And of course they all gathered around him and sympathized and do you, you need, you know, any money?
Yes. I haven’t been paid. I don’t even have the gas to get there. So they gave them one of the, one of their pickup trucks and a credit card. And so I guess about a week later someone asked someone else how so and so’s daughter? He doesn’t have a daughter.
[00:27:38] Rob Williams: Yeah.
[00:27:39] Stephen Brown: And they checked the credit card and he went straight to New Orleans and was working hard to max that baby out.
And so it was real easy that even on the truck, they had telematics. All they had to do was trace a truck to New Orleans. But anyway they got him and the truck and he had a great time. really did.
[00:28:01] Wade Carpenter: Well, I’m sure we could probably sit here and tell stories for quite a long time, but.
[00:28:08] Stephen Brown: Well, it’s, it really is tragic and it’s not funny when it’s your money being stolen. Not funny a bit. But an underwriter buddy of mine that used to do this fidelity coverage underwriting, we talked about all the claims we had and what people did, and we always said we would be the best white collar criminals. If we ever went bad, you know, we would be the best white collar criminals. That’s not really anything to brag about, but we aren’t white collar criminals. But it’s funny what you learn and interesting to learn from the stories of people that steal and how creative they are.
[00:28:44] Rob Williams: it is. I just took my money laundering class. I’ve gotta take one every year. And it wasn’t as interesting this year. I think in the past they really almost taught us how to launder money at those things. I think they’re changing those courses. It was more about regulatory things and people in position to report things to, but I think they changed that course. I think they were like informing everybody on these requirement courses. Yeah so I guess we won’t teach everybody how to do it.
But here on the Contractor Success Forum, you can learn a lot of things towards your unofficial MBA towards your contracting business. Do we have any other points?
[00:29:20] Wade Carpenter: No, I think we need to wrap up here, but I hope we gave some people some things to think about and don’t assume it can’t happen to you because those are the times where we end up with a story to tell on the podcast here, so.
[00:29:34] Stephen Brown: It’s tragic when someone you love and really trust steals from you. Like you said, Rob, don’t put them in that position ever. Just don’t do it. It’s just not. It’s not smart business.
[00:29:46] Rob Williams: That’s right. Well, we’re happy to be riding with you guys today in your truck, talking with Stephen Brown and Wade Carpenter and Rob Williams on your ride from job to job today, getting your MBA at the Contractor Success Forum. And enjoying it with these great, wonderful personalities you have to spend your day with.
And we’ll enjoy spending the day with you on the next Contractor Success, Forum.