Three contract terms to get paid faster
This week we’re joined by special guest Alex Barthet, construction attorney and owner of the construction law blog The Lien Zone. He joins us this week to talk about the three contract provisions that he sees as most important when it comes to contractors getting paid.
Topics we cover in this episode include:
- Pay-when-paid Provisions
- Retainage and how to get paid sooner
- Lien Waivers
- Free tools to help you understand contracts and get paid faster
LINKS
Links to the tools Alex mentioned on the show:
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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 three contract terms to get paid faster.
And who do we have with us today? On this very special day, we have Alex Barthet with The Lien Zone construction law blog. And we have our regular crew, Stephen Brown, McDaniel Whitley bonding and insurance agency. And in the other corner, we have Wade Carpenter, Carpenter and Company CPAs. And I am Rob Williams with IronGate Entrepreneurial Support Systems.
Alex, tell us about you and your company and your podcast and how you got in this business of construction and lien laws and all this great stuff.
[00:00:50] Alex Barthet: Sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me guys. I appreciate it. I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while and I said, you know what, let me reach out to these guys who seem to know what they got going on about construction and helping contractors, which is what we do on the Lien Zone Podcast.
So I’m a board certified construction attorney here in South Florida. I was a mechanical engineer and then decided to go over to the dark side, as some of my clients tell me, and become a lawyer. And I work with my father and we have 12 lawyers that work with us. And all we do is construction law.
We help those folks in the trade with their contracts, help them get paid, deal with liens and bonds, and construction defects. That’s what we do every day.
[00:01:30] Rob Williams: I was just thinking about that. All four of us are second generation somewhere, in the thing, you know, Wade and I, we all have dads. And then Stephen’s got a relative in the business. That’s interesting. We’re all second generation, at least second.
[00:01:44] Alex Barthet: Yeah, makes it–
[00:01:45] Stephen Brown: True, I, maybe easier. I mean, it is, as far as getting advice. It seems to me that my job seems to be getting a little bit easier as I have a few years on me, but I think the most interesting thing to me that I wanted to ask Alex is, how did your engineering degree help you in working with contractors?
[00:02:03] Alex Barthet: It gives you a level of understanding of construction that most lawyers don’t have, when you have a engineering or construction management degree before you went to law school. I, when I went to law school, I think it was me and maybe one other person that had a science or engineering degree.
Most everyone had a Poli Sci degree, an English degree. So yeah, it was unusual. I thought I wanted to be a patent attorney first. So I actually studied and took the patent bar and then started doing that and realized, well, geez, this is incredibly boring. So, I decided, you know, let me try this construction thing.
We always had construction clients when I started working with my father almost 25 years ago. But more and more, it’s just grown. And now it’s all we do. We don’t do anything else. It’s just construction.
[00:02:50] Stephen Brown: Yeah, there’s nothing boring about construction law, I imagine.
[00:02:54] Alex Barthet: Correct. Always exciting. And they’re great clients.
[00:02:56] Wade Carpenter: –more about taxes either.
[00:02:58] Stephen Brown: We talked about some topics that our mutual listeners need to know. And Alex, we’re just, we’re grateful to have you on our podcast because we always say that your financial board of directors should include your construction oriented CPA, construction business advisor, like Rob, banker, lawyer, and a bonding and insurance agent like me. So thank you.
[00:03:22] Alex Barthet: No, you’re very welcome. And I agree. I can tell you having done this for a long time, our most successful clients have all of those folks in their corner, all focused on construction. Those are the clients that are doing the best because they have a group of people around them that understand the industry, especially the local industry. It makes a big difference.
[00:03:43] Rob Williams: Yeah. I just had a conversation with one of my neighbors who just sold his $150 million construction business. And he said he had the same team, his board, his lawyer, banker, even the same banker for 25 years. But he had them and that, cause I was asking him what was the most instrumental thing he said is having that same group the whole time.
Hey, I can’t believe he never changed them in 25 years. That was surprising. So that’s great. CPA, everything. So, it’s very interesting. Good to know. So let’s talk about these contract terms and the lien, our, our subject.
[00:04:19] Wade Carpenter: When Alex reached out, we were talking about all kind of things that Alex helps contractors with. And one of the topics we talk about all the time on this podcast is cash flow and getting paid.
[00:04:31] Stephen Brown: Getting paid.
[00:04:33] Wade Carpenter: Some great topics here and some contract provisions and just, can I just kind of throw it to you, Alex? And can we maybe talk about some of these terms?
[00:04:42] Alex Barthet: Sure. Yeah. Let’s talk about these three terms that I see as really important. And it affects all of the things that we each do for our respective clients.
The pay-when-paid provision, which differs by state. We’ll talk about Florida and some other states. Retainage, right? Which is effectively your profit, waiting til the end of the job to get it, how to get it a little sooner. And then lien waivers. How to deal with lien waivers. We have had many clients lose lots of money because they signed lien waivers, giving up rights well in advance because they didn’t understand the document. So you guys wanna break down each one, one by one?
[00:05:17] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:05:19] Rob Williams: That’d be great.
Pay-when-paid Provisions
[00:05:20] Alex Barthet: All right. So at least here in Florida, and I know we’re not all in the same state, but at least here in Florida, pay-when-paid is a perfectly legal term. It has to have certain magic language like condition precedent or contingent upon, but as long as you have that magic language, then if you’re a sub on a job, then you are subject to not getting paid if the owner doesn’t pay the contractor. Which is a big deal, right? I mean, that means that you are shouldering the financial risk of something going wrong on the job. So what do your clients typically do with that? And I know maybe in your states, their pay-when-paid’s not permissible.
[00:05:58] Wade Carpenter: Well, I think some of my clients, I know that they hate dealing with it, but you know, at some point, if you’re not getting paid, you have to kind of stop work. And that’s always a question is, do I have the right to stop work? Can I legally do this?
[00:06:13] Alex Barthet: Most contracts don’t give you the right to stop work. Most actually say you can’t stop work if you’re not getting paid. So what we recommend strongly is that clients add an express right to stop work. So it says if I haven’t been paid in 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, whatever you can negotiate, that you have the right to stop working.
So that even if you don’t get paid because you have to deal with the pay-when-paid provision, you at least can stop the bleeding. You can stop paying payroll, you can stop paying your vendors, delivering materials. So that’s absolutely critical as a contract provision.
Sometimes people ask me, Alex, look, I’ve got this 60 page contract. I really want the job. What’s the one thing I have to change? Like just tell me one thing, Alex, that’s all I can change. And I tell them it’s adding the right to stop work. It’s probably the single most important thing you can do because the fastest way to go out of business, and you guys can talk about it from the financial side, is if you have to keep working, paying bills and you’re not getting money coming in the door, because you’re not getting paid.
[00:07:21] Stephen Brown: Is there some language, Alex, in those clauses that will allow the owner, or if you’re dealing with a construction manager or GC, to adjust their prices when you have to get back started? If you stop work, because you’re not getting paid? Or at that time is the contract just terminated?
[00:07:40] Alex Barthet: So usually the way the provisions are written is it says that you have the right to stop work if you’re not getting paid after a certain period of time, but then once you get paid again, then you have to go back.
What we find is that it’s pretty hard to get a right to stop work provision added to your contract anyways. It’s not a simple thing to do. And usually you’d like to be able to say if I’m, if I haven’t been paid for 30 days, I get to stop work. Usually the contractor is gonna push that to 45, 60, I’ve even seen 90 days. So to add in other provisions to say what happens when you have to come back to work is usually pretty hard. So we just leave that out. We’ll deal with that when when we have to.
But you know, your question dovetails on another interesting topic, which we could probably spend a whole podcast on, which is material price escalation, right? Which is, what does it cost to come back to a job if it’s been sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty days? That’s a whole nother podcast I’m sure we could have on dealing with price escalation.
[00:08:39] Stephen Brown: Right. You’ve had to demobilize from that job site. There’s more cost involved.
[00:08:45] Rob Williams: Well, what does happen with the owner? Say I’m, like when I had my framing business in the lumber business, so if I had the right to stop the work with the contractor, but how does that go up further? Do you have it depends on because there are layers here. So how does, who has the right to even sign that? And when is it even permissible to stop the whole job? Because if I’m a lower tier person, how can you stop the job way up, if the GC or the owner, you know, somebody at some level didn’t know about that provision, what happens then?
[00:09:18] Alex Barthet: Right. Well, so most of the time your contract is gonna incorporate by reference all of the prime contract terms and conditions, right? So you have these flow down provisions. But what governs is gonna be your subcontract or sub subcontract. So I guess, Rob, the direct answer to your question is if it’s you, what do you care, right? You’re the one that wants to get paid. So, if it stops the job and that’s what gets you paid.
[00:09:43] Rob Williams: Yeah. Is it enforceable? Is what I was sort of thinking, I guess at that point.
[00:09:48] Alex Barthet: At least it’s between the parties that signed it. Correct. Yeah, because don’t forget he’s signing he, the contractor, or she is. They’re signing for themselves. So they could solve the problem by paying you, even if they haven’t been paid. Right? So they don’t have to stop the whole job. They could come out of pocket. Not that they would. But that’s really the leverage that you create.
[00:10:08] Rob Williams: Okay.
[00:10:08] Wade Carpenter: I know thinking about this too from the subcontractor standpoint, a lot of times they’re intimidated. They want the job and that GC has got their own provisions and they feel like they can’t go and ask for changes in those terms.
[00:10:23] Alex Barthet: Yeah. That’s a, they would be wrong.
[00:10:27] Stephen Brown: That’s really bad logic, especially in today’s environment. There needed more than ever. Now’s the time you should really be tweaking those contracts. And then once you start doing it, you can’t go back from that. You’ve kind of started a precedence that that person you’re working with has accepted.
[00:10:45] Alex Barthet: Yeah. I agree with that, Stephen.
[00:10:46] Rob Williams: Yeah, that goes really back into an overarching subject that we talk about a lot is, what is your ideal client and your ideal job? And then sometimes the best deal you ever do is the deal that you didn’t take. So, getting into that and not being afraid to not take the job if you can’t get those provisions in there.
When you get desperate for a job, and that is when things get really kinda scary. You make some bad decisions. I’ve been there and I have definitely been there, especially when I had a factory to fill up. We didn’t have the volume. We had downtime, things like that. You take a lot of not very smart provisions. So it’s trying to really focus in on finding the jobs that you can get these contracts in those. And if you can’t get these in here, that’s not your ideal client. You’d better go find some more jobs that are your ideal clients that you can get these provisions in there. That’s what I would say to that.
[00:11:37] Alex Barthet: Yeah. And most subcontractors think that the contractor won’t make any changes. Sometimes it’s written right on the contract, do not amend this contract. And your contact point is gonna say, oh no, we don’t, we don’t amend our contracts. You can’t change it.
I’m here to tell you that every contractor, at least in south Florida, that we deal with says that ,it’s written on their contract, and all of them will make changes to the contract.
[00:12:01] Rob Williams: Yeah.
[00:12:01] Alex Barthet: All of them.
[00:12:01] Rob Williams: Right.
[00:12:02] Stephen Brown: You do what you have to do to do business. And if you’re doing business you gotta set some terms that are fair to you.
[00:12:09] Alex Barthet: Yeah, very much so. Very much so. And then what I find that our clients find is that the more that they do it, the easier it gets. The hardest contract to amend is the first one. And after that you realize, wow, this actually isn’t so bad. I may not get everything in, but I’m starting to make material changes to the contract. Like for example, the right to stop work.
Retainage and how to get paid sooner
[00:12:31] Alex Barthet: Or we could talk about the next provision, which is retainage, right? How to get paid sooner. You could talk about that, Stephen, like, that’s all your money, right? Your retainage is. So what do you do to get it paid to you sooner? And what we find is you have to make a change to the contract to try to get it paid sooner.
It’s always gonna be contingent on the owner or the lender funding it. You’re never gonna get it such that you will get paid your retainage when it hasn’t been funded upstream, but but you gotta ask for it.
[00:13:02] Stephen Brown: I would think that’d be pretty easy language to add, if it’s reasonable. Just to make sure that you’re gonna get your retainage in a timely manner when the project’s punched out.
[00:13:13] Alex Barthet: One of the things we add, if you’re the GC, the easy solution, the easy first pass is, you wanna make sure that there is no retainage held on your fee and general conditions. That’s kind of low hanging fruit. So if I’m a GC and I’m negotiating a contract with an owner and they’re gonna hold retainage, I’m gonna say fine. You can hold retainage, but you can’t hold it on my fee and you can’t hold it on my general conditions. Most owners will agree to that. So that’s a great way to get your money.
[00:13:43] Stephen Brown: When you’re saying fee, what does that mean?
[00:13:45] Alex Barthet: So let’s say I’ve got a cost plus contract. Maybe it’s $10 million and my fee is 7%. So I’m gonna bill my 7% fee every month and they’re not gonna hold retainage on it. So I get my profit with no hold back and I get my general conditions, the dumpster, the fence, all of that stuff. I get all of those paid with no retainage held. I was negotiating a contract yesterday for a GC and that’s what we asked for and they agreed– the owner. No problem.
[00:14:18] Stephen Brown: Yeah, well, they should.
[00:14:20] Wade Carpenter: Alex, I think about some of the contractors, like the subs that are earlier in a job, the grading guys and the concrete guys that put stuff in first. And then I’ve seen them where they’ve had to wait two or three years to get paid on stuff that, and they were very early on in the contract.
And so are there any ways that you can tell people to negotiate those things?
[00:14:41] Alex Barthet: What I find is that most seasoned contractors recognize that the grading foundation, underground contractors, they need their money soon. So even before they negotiate with the actual trades person, usually they’re putting that in as a carve out for early retention release.
Again, it’s always subject to lender approval. So if there’s a lender on the project, it’s always gonna be subject to the lender approving, but you, as the underground contractor, the site work contractor, you want to include a provision in your contract that says that you can get your retainage release once your scope of work is done, and then approved by the engineer, architect, authority having jurisdiction. And what we see is that it probably works more than half the time. But what you also get is some hold back. So maybe they’re not gonna hold 10%. Maybe they’ll release 5%. Maybe they’ll release seven and a half percent. But it’s better than 10% being held.
So, on an accounting side, what do you see, Stephen, on that? I guess your clients are probably not happy to have to wait for their money that long, right?
[00:15:59] Stephen Brown: Yeah, and there’s usually some agreement to reduce retainage clause or provisions we see in the contracts. Retainage is an issue that contractors have mixed feelings on and it’s a lot of money and it’s real. And we talk about cash flow. That’s part of cash flow management, managing your retainage. So that’s very important to most of our listeners.
[00:16:23] Rob Williams: Yeah, it was so interesting. When I got into this business, a lot of the subcontractors, we have higher margins, like the framing and stuff. We had a higher margin than the GC. And I was told, he said, well, that, that retainage thing, you’d better just price it, counting on not getting it. And just whatever you get later, it’s just a bonus that’ll come in. And they don’t even track it. I was just shocked. I said, you’re kid– that’s a lot of money.
And the way they were looking at that and the advice I was getting from these other smaller subs, it was like, you’re kidding. You don’t track that? You just wait for these checks to come in? It’s wow. That’s just shocking. The GCs definitely can’t do it because that retainage might be their whole profit, or more than their profit. So it was very interesting when we got into that and then, I guess we’ll talk about lien waivers in a second too, but yeah. It was a very different world where we were in our part of the country and I think it had not hit us yet. But that’s 20 years ago, I guess, Stephen, they’re–
[00:17:17] Alex Barthet: No I would tell you, no, it’s probably not too different. I think I would see that what you said as even applicable here, depending on the size and sophistication of the contractor. So a lot of people don’t wanna hire a lawyer to review their contract. A lot of folks think that it’s too costly, too expensive. I’m not able to change it. So why even bother?
And those are all of the roadblocks that contractors want you to believe so that it’s easy for them to get you to sign their 6, 8, 38 page contract without you even looking at it. When we spoke before I told you about a story, we have a client relatively new client, $200 million cabinet company, right? Big company, right? You think they got everything dialed in. $200 million.
Before they hired us, they would sign any contract that was given to them. They didn’t even check it, review it, modify it. They just assumed if a contractor gave me a contract, I have to sign it. And we told them, no, actually you don’t. You can make lots of changes.
And we’ve been representing them for almost a year and they send us every contract and we make lots of modifications and they get probably a third to half of the modifications inserted into the contract. And if everything goes well, it doesn’t even matter. The contract stays in a drawer in someone’s file folder on their computer and no one ever looks at it. But if something does go wrong, you now at least have a contract that’s fair or more fair so that you can deal with the issues in a more meaningful way than just getting it jammed down your throat.
[00:18:58] Stephen Brown: Yeah, Alex it’s frustrating to me. I’m a surety bonding agent, and of course, when someone needs a performance and payment bond, I have to have a copy of the contract. And there’s a lot of information that I have to find very quickly in that contract. And they’re all different. And there’s standard contracts. There’s AIA contracts and DocuSign. All of them have addendums and revisions to them. So you have to read it. And I have to read them all the time, and I’m not a lawyer. And I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. It’s frustrating. But my better clients have also, without us discussing it, send it to their attorney before they sign it.
And just like your attorney, the more educated you are about reading these contracts, the better you can pick out questions. The faster you can read them. The faster your estimators and project managers can scan over them and see, what terms and conditions are in this contract that should keep us from bidding it? We shouldn’t even waste our time and money bidding it.
[00:19:58] Alex Barthet: So I wanna blow your mind. You ready, Stephen? I’m not sure if I mentioned this to you before. So we created a tool that we released a few months ago called Contract Detective. So anyone can go to it. You go to contractdetective.com. You upload your contract up to a hundred pages. And within about two minutes, you’ll get an email back with your contract, with the provisions that we determine are problematic. We’ve identified 10 hidden conditions, consequential damages, pay-when-paid. And your contract will come back to you in an email highlighted with those terms identified. So at least you can find them, and then understand them. It’ll have a link to a video explaining what those contract provisions are, how they work.
So, the goal is to try to make it less intimidating, easier for folks to be able to understand their contracts. A more level playing field between the parties.
[00:20:57] Stephen Brown: That is fantastic, Alex, that really is.
[00:21:01] Rob Williams: And is that across states? Is that only for Florida contractors, or do you think can people anywhere use that?
[00:21:07] Alex Barthet: Anybody anywhere can use it. That being said, we are only licensed in Florida. Our focus with this tool is Florida, but that being said, you know, the consequential damage provision is the same in Tennessee as it is in California as it is in Florida. But it is focused on Florida.
We have a lot of people that are using it from other states.
[00:21:27] Rob Williams: Great. That’s amazing. So I guess you’ve got the AI working on this now.
[00:21:32] Alex Barthet: Correct.
[00:21:33] Stephen Brown: Alex, tell our listeners again, how they can get ahold of this?
[00:21:37] Alex Barthet: Just go to contractdetective.com.
[00:21:40] Stephen Brown: Okay. Well, that’s easy.
[00:21:42] Alex Barthet: it’ll take you right there. And you click the button that says scan your contract and you upload it. Put your email address in and in about a minute or two you’ll get an email with your contract highlighted and annotated with those provisions identified.
[00:21:58] Stephen Brown: Well, I’ve got one right now. I’m getting ready to do a bond for.
[00:22:01] Alex Barthet: All right. I wanna see it. I wanna see you submit it, Stephen.
[00:22:04] Rob Williams: Yeah.
[00:22:05] Stephen Brown: I can’t wait.
[00:22:06] Rob Williams: Can’t wait! You gotta let us know how that goes.
[00:22:08] Wade Carpenter: Yeah, we definitely need to put that in the show notes so our listeners can find that. But I know we’re kind of running short on time. We haven’t even hit lien waivers and I know that’s one of the topics I deal with all the time from both sides of the GC side and the sub side.
Lien Waivers
[00:22:21] Alex Barthet: Yeah. Look, I’ll tell you what I see happen with lien waivers all the time. So it’s a couple of things. So one, you sign a contract and it says one of two things. It says you agree to sign any form of release that I give you. But it doesn’t have the form attached to the contract.
So when you sign a contract that says that, they can hand you a lien release that you’re gonna object to, but you’ve agreed to sign it because that’s what the contract says. So we strike those provisions and say, no, we’re gonna use these form releases that are attached. And we’re gonna attach the proposed releases.
The second thing is that they attach a release form that you are just gonna object to. And the main objection that we see is that, one, it is a very broad release. You’re releasing any and all rights that you could possibly have before the through date in the release. So if I sign a release for a period through the end of last month, I may be releasing all of my rights: rights to retainage, to change orders that haven’t been executed, to claims that I may have, but I haven’t yet fully submitted, or even if I have submitted them.
So you just have to be careful that you carve out from your release, those claims that you have. One of the things that people don’t understand is that if I am asked to do a change order in the month of June and I haven’t submitted my paperwork yet, and I do the work in the month of June, and now it’s July.
I have to submit all of my releases and I sign a release that says I’m releasing all of my lien rights, my rights to claims for change orders for work in place, everything, but I don’t have an approved change order, but I sign that release? I am technically legally giving up my right to that money for the change order that I did, that I don’t have an approved change order for. So you have to be very careful of that. I would tell you, 99 times out of a hundred, the paperwork kind of just follows on, you’ll get paid. The change order will get negotiated and approved and it never becomes an issue.
And the only time it does become an issue is when everything goes to hell, the lawyers get involved and they look at these releases and they say, wait a second. You signed this release and you have all this money that’s due. We’re not gonna pay you now because you signed a release that gave up those rights.
So you just have to be very cautious. So our advice to clients is you should have a change order log of all of your RCOs or PCOS, and that log should be updated regularly. And that log should be the list of exceptions that goes in every release every month. So in June, I may have RCO six, 12, and 14, and those are gonna be the exceptions in my release.
That’s June and now it’s July. And now I have RCO 12, 14, and 19. Now those are my exceptions to my release. And if you do that, then you never lose any rights because you’re always carving them out of every release, every month.
[00:25:23] Rob Williams: So how do they put that in there for the guys that haven’t been doing that? How actually, I wouldn’t be sure exactly how to work that. Do they list it? Do they attach that? Is there a place for that?
[00:25:33] Alex Barthet: So people believe that like you have to be really sophisticated, and it needs to have an exhibit or you could literally just write it on the release. This release excludes Change Order six, 12, and 14. Period. Sign it, submit it. That’s it. You’re done.
[00:25:54] Rob Williams: It’s amazing how that stops so many people. It’s oh God, I just gotta get the work done. Just, oh, I know I heard that from, Alex told me that on this. Oh, I’m just signing it and let’s get on with it. Let’s get this job done. It’s because they don’t know how to write it. They just don’t know it’s something as simple as that, they think it has to be something so formal.
[00:26:11] Alex Barthet: Correct. The other thing is making the release conditioned on actually getting paid. That’s a big deal too. Making sure that when you sign a release and it says that you are gonna get $10,000, that it’s conditioned on you actually getting the $10,000. Because what happens is if I sign a release, And it says that I have received the 10,000, so I don’t have it yet, but the release says that I did get it. And I’m a supplier and I give that release to the electrician because I’m an electrical supply house. And the electrician takes it and hands it to the GC who hands it to the owner.
So the releases have gone all the way up and now I’m waiting for the money to start coming back down to me, and it never does. Wait a second. What do I do? Well, the owner in most states is able to rely on that release that they got, even though you never got the money because they didn’t know you didn’t get the money because the release that they paid against– don’t forget, it’s so far up the chain, the release that they paid against said that you got the money. So they have every reason to believe that you got paid.
[00:27:19] Rob Williams: That sounds like it can be complicated. So you write that in there somewhere?
[00:27:23] Alex Barthet: Yeah, so actually, hold on here. Let me go over here. So we have another tool. We’re big on tools here at The Lien Zone.
So we have this tool called the Make Me Conditional stamp. So–
[00:27:34] Rob Williams: Good tool.
[00:27:35] Alex Barthet: So you stamp it right on the release and it has the conditional language. So if you don’t know that the lien release is conditional, you stamp it on the release, and then it’ll have a little blank right on the stamp and you put $10,000.
So if you’re expecting $10,000, you stamp it on the little blank. You write $10,000, and now it has all the language to make the release conditional, and anyone can get one for free. They go to MakeMeConditional.com. There’s a little video of how it works, put in your information. We send it to you in the mail.
So, yeah. And I don’t wanna hawk all of my wears here, but we got lots of other things
[00:28:18] Stephen Brown: Lien wheel, baby!
[00:28:20] Alex Barthet: Right. We got Calc-U-Lien.
[00:28:21] Stephen Brown: Matic!
[00:28:22] Alex Barthet: Right. And then the Lien-O-Maticic. Right? So we’ll put all of these in the show notes, everyone, we give it all away for free.
[00:28:28] Rob Williams: This is amazing.
[00:28:30] Stephen Brown: Crazy.
[00:28:30] Rob Williams: So, so where can we find them? Our listeners should know that we can go to ContractorSuccessForum.com and find this episode, look for your episode and the notes. And we have all kinds of great resources there. And where do we go to find your resources again, Alex?
[00:28:45] Alex Barthet: Everything is at TheLienZone.com. L-I-E-N. TheLienZone.com. There’s links there to all of these tools and other, we have free forms that you can download, release forms, contractors final affidavits, lien notice to owner forms. So yeah, the links are all there by the way, to Contract Detective to the Make Me Conditional. So if you go to TheLienZone.com, you’ll get access to everything.
[00:29:14] Stephen Brown: Man, Alex Barthet, you are way low down, man. Great stuff. That’s great. Thank you.
[00:29:22] Alex Barthet: No, no, happy to do it. And I appreciate you guys having me on your podcast.
[00:29:26] Rob Williams: And we appreciate being on your podcast. So this is dual today. So, this is, this has been really exciting. This is amazing. All the value that we’re getting from this one today. I know this is gonna be popular and there’ll be discussions.
So there are places that you can start and ask questions. And we love to hear from our listeners. Ask us questions. What are new topics that you may want us to talk about again? What do you want to hear more from Alex about? And you can go to our, the resources of where it would be right now. You can go on LinkedIn, but I think we’re trying to work on putting something actually where you can get the resources at ContractorSuccessForum.Com and find the discussion there. Ask us questions. We’d love to hear from you. We know lots of you guys are listening and I get people coming up to me at parties or funerals or different things and telling me they’ve been listening, but we wanna hear from you. We wanna know.
So go to ContractorSuccessForum.Com or TheLienZone.com and get that material. We really appreciate having you on Alex. And then we have Wade Carpenter and Stephen Brown, and I’m Rob Williams at the Contractor Success Forum. Thanks for being here today and come back and listen to the Contractor Success Forum. And we’ll see you on the next episode.