Construction Lessons from the Great Recession

Inflation, supply chain issues, and higher costs have many of us wondering if we’re heading towards a recession. While we can’t predict the future, we can provide some lessons learned from the Great Recession, including how to protect your construction company from an economic downturn.

Topics we cover in this episode include:

• What to do about equipment when a recession is possible
• Watch your overhead in a recession and understand your cost structure
• Get good systems in place before a recession
• Dig into your accounting during a recession
• Know when to cut back and avoid getting a bond claim during a recession
• Be flexible and able to make quick decisions with the information you have
• Implement Profit First to get a handle on your cash flow

LINKS

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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’re discussing lessons from the Great Recession. Because here on the Contractor Success Forum, we discuss how to run a more profitable, successful construction business. 

And we have with a Stephen Brown with McDaniel Whitley bonding, an insurance agency. And we also have Wade Carpenter with Carpenter and Company, CPAs. And I am Rob Williams with IronGate Entrepreneurial Support Systems. 

And so, lessons that we’ve learned from the great recession and all these other things, man. Can you remember all this stuff? And is it starting to get familiar?

[00:00:44] Stephen Brown: I don’t know why they call it the Great Recession, because I just remember it sucked. 

[00:00:49] Rob Williams: Yeah, 

[00:00:49] Stephen Brown: Nothing great about it.

[00:00:51] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. I actually minored in economics in college. It was just one of those things I was always fascinated by. And there’s always ups and downs in the economy, construction like any industry goes in cycles. The Great Recession was the worst one since the Great Depression in the thirties.

And it was by far the most severe as well as one of the longest ones we’ve had in quite a while. I know we’ve got three guys on here that have all lived through it and we’ve probably all got our war stories from it, but you know, it officially, it lasted from like December 2007 to June of 2009.

I don’t know about there in Memphis, but here in Atlanta, there’s been some long term impacts for my contractors that it took a lot longer to get past that.

[00:01:38] Rob Williams: Oh, yeah, I’d say now, the names on all the signs and the builders and the home builders tournaments that I go to and things, I don’t know many of these people anymore.

[00:01:47] Stephen Brown: All new names, isn’t–

[00:01:49] Rob Williams: Just completely turned over. But I’d say the recession, my niche was right there at the heart of it. Affordable housing is where it all started. So we just absolutely got crunched. It wasn’t like things were down 30% or 20%. Things in our market were shut off and we were built as a recession-proof business because people always needed affordable housing. 

In all the other downturns, they never really affected us that much. In a way it was good for us because people always needed a starter home and people wanted the starter homes. They just couldn’t get the financing. And then that rolled over into construction and what more probably our listeners are in, the commercial thing. So that was like a year or two later when that came. 

So I got to experience both because I made the transition from the residential then went into the more commercial aspect. So I got to feel it twice in a row in just a few years.

[00:02:51] Stephen Brown: Ouch.

[00:02:52] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.

[00:02:53] Rob Williams: Right.

[00:02:53] Wade Carpenter: I definitely saw that there was a very big difference in residential versus commercial, because a lot of the commercial guys had some projects that were going, but they didn’t get hit as fast. But it seemed like the commercial guys took longer to recover as well. So I don’t know if Stephen, did–

[00:03:11] Stephen Brown: Yeah, I, well, so much of the private work, the interest rates went through the roof and they weren’t financing these projects, they just weren’t gonna do it with rates that high. They couldn’t afford it. And, as a result, there were hundreds of thousands of construction employees that lost their jobs.

Are we heading into another recession? 

[00:03:28] Wade Carpenter: So I guess the big question, we’re recording this middle of July or so of 2022. Are we heading into another recession? And I guess, I don’t know if you guys wanna kick that around. 

[00:03:39] Stephen Brown: Don’t have a guest economist on the show.

[00:03:42] Wade Carpenter: Well, the R word, the recession word sometimes has a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you start talking about it, when people start believing it, that’s when it happens. But there are several factors right now. We all can point to the supply chain issues, inflation started going up, the cost of everything is gone up, more so since the early eighties, when we had another recession. We haven’t seen inflation like this in 40 years.

So the signs are there and you guys chime in on whether you think it’s coming or not, but.

[00:04:15] Rob Williams: I think one of the big points to all of these is, is it everybody? There are niches that were really profitable throughout all these. So where are you? And then how can you protect? And I remember that book got re-energized during that Who Moved My Cheese, with little Remy and, and whatever, those little two mice that were going around, that book got really popular again. That book may come back again, just because there are gonna be people that are benefiting a lot because it’s change. And then some people that are not and are we gonna be stagnant and do what we were always doing, or what is it that we can do to adjust or compensate? 

Or what permanent things do we have in place that lets our businesses naturally do this? Are we set up for it? I think in my business, the way we were for so long, we were started so early, before I was born, is we had so much fixed cost. 

We were the old builders, some of the biggest builders, I ran into one of them at the bank the other day. And we were talking about our other buddy who’s now the current biggest builder in there. And he actually lost money I think, lost a lot of money last year, even in this big thing, just because of the pricing protection, even though his volume is way up, but I know he’s got a lot of fixed costs and he didn’t have a lot of price protection. He’s more of a marketer. So that brings up a lot of different subjects.

[00:05:41] Stephen Brown: Yeah, I’m wondering how many normal Joes like us knew that the inability to get computer chips for your car would shut down Detroit.

Equipment and recessions

[00:05:52] Wade Carpenter: That’s one of the points I wanted to eventually lead into. We had a lot of heavy equipment guys that, they have a huge investments in the heavy yellow iron we talk about. And when things started going down and during the Great Recession, a lot of those guys did not survive. They could not sustain these payments on the heavy equipment. They believed that owning this equipment is the best thing since sliced bread, and we can always do it cheaper if we own it ourselves. 

But when you’ve got all these payments on it and you run outta cash, you run outta work, that’s where we’re talking about running into issues.

The ones that actually survived, there was one in particular that, he just had fewer pieces of equipment. He ran it out of his home versus, I had one that was probably 70, 80 million in grading, that kind of stuff, pipeline.

They’re gone. And they were a huge contractor before and they lost everything in it.

[00:06:48] Stephen Brown: And asphalt paving is such a heavy equipment trade.

[00:06:53] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. 

[00:06:53] Stephen Brown: What other accounting tips do you have?

Watch your overhead in a recession and understand your cost structure

[00:06:55] Wade Carpenter: Well, so again, the overhead is number one thing in a recession that you gotta really watch. But this is the time that you need to understand your cost structure. You need to understand overhead and your job costing. And I know we preach this on this show all the time about getting that in place, but if you’re heading into a recession, that’s exactly when you need to know these things. And one of my pet peeves, I talk about all the time is, people use an overhead factor that they used at their company, that they, they learned the trade at, which may have absolutely nothing to do with, what their current cost structure is.

[00:07:36] Stephen Brown: Good point. I like talking about the back office stuff, because that’s what we are, finance and risk management arm. Business coaches, accounting, we’re all about a successful contracting company. But when we talk about overhead their eyes just glaze over. There’s still so many contractors out there that won’t even recognize they have overhead. They don’t want to, they don’t want think about it. And I can just tell you, I’m not exaggerating. Some really great contractors are just like, are you talking?

I don’t, I don’t wanna talk about it. I really don’t. And it doesn’t have to be painful. Just listen to some good advice. Delegate. And get it done, it’s just like anything else. And I would say lessons learned from the Great Recession, like you said, Wade, overhead will each up if it’s outta control. But it’ll also cost you the profits that you have to have.

You’ve gotta have that cash if a recession comes, we’ve always said that cash is king.

[00:08:35] Rob Williams: Yeah, it is, we were just talking about that cost structure and the overhead recently when we were talking about lean manufacturing and Eli Goldratt and the thought of it, and I think most of the builders, at least in the old days, the way we were, we thought of our overhead as sunk cost. And you have to adjust your volume and your margins to cover that. 

We get it in our mindset. Well, one it’s comfortable. It’s hard to change those things. You’ve had those things in place for so long that they’re fixed and you just have to figure out how to bring enough in to cover all that. And that doesn’t have to be the mindset.

Get good systems in place

[00:09:16] Rob Williams: I don’t think most people even have the systems and processes in place and defined to be able to adjust that because most of these systems and processes are in people’s heads. And so you can’t get rid of that burden. You can’t cut it back. You can’t make changes and there’s nobody else to learn that. So you’re not flexible.

[00:09:36] Stephen Brown: That’s a great point. The systems have to be placed. And also the battle inside and outside offices. Your inside office is your overhead and they’re not making any money. They’re managing costs. And then you’re outside people that are out there sweating and doing the work and it really needs to be combined together. It’s a team that can’t survive without each other.

Dig into your accounting during a recession

[00:09:59] Wade Carpenter: Stephen, you’re making my point exactly. And I know it sounds very self-serving, but this is not the time to back off on your accounting. This is the time to really dig into your accounting and understand what you’re doing. And so many contractors still run their you know, job file, what’s in my bank account.

Know when to cut back

[00:10:18] Wade Carpenter: This is not a time to guess, and this is the time to get a good handle on it. So, if you don’t have some of that in place, you have no idea when to cut back. And one of the biggest mistakes a lot of contractors, I’ll talk about some examples in a minute, but contractors did not know when to cut back when things were going down. 

They continue with the mentality that we talk about all the time, get more revenue, you know. And unfortunately, especially my grading pipeline underground utility guys, all the residential stuff dried up, the private stuff. So everybody with all this equipment starts bidding all these jobs. The gross margins go down. 

So, you need to number one, understand what your overhead is and what you’ve gotta cover. If you know your break even point and you start cutting your margin, and you know what all this overhead is, a lot of contractors would say, there’s no way I could possibly make it.

Avoid getting a bond claim during a recession

[00:11:13] Wade Carpenter: And my hope is that people would make better, faster decisions because, we did see a lot of people hang on too long, hate to say, but, until they ran out of cash. I’m sure Stephen saw some bond claims and stuff like that. People going in bankruptcy during that time.

[00:11:30] Stephen Brown: The bond claim, it hurts so much. You lose a friend, you lose a client. Well, you don’t lose a friend, but you lose a client and it’s never the same, because you’ve had a bond claim and you can’t get bonds again. You just can’t. And it doesn’t mean you’re not a good person, but it means you just, you can always Monday morning quarterback when these things happen, Wade. Always. 

Be flexible and able to make quick decisions with the information you have

[00:11:57] Stephen Brown: We are obsessed with analyzing what happened. I gotta know what happened. And in my business, that’s all we do. We obsess about it and there’s always a reason every single time. And what I see is that stubbornness, ego, being hardheaded and not willing to change and be flexible. Like you said, with that accounting information, you got what you need to make quick decisions.

Where is my company making the most money? What do I do best? And where can I leverage that experience, and my current staff, and my current equipment, and my current backlog to go get the most money? And you can do that during a recession. We’re not sitting here saying, guys, you need to hunker down and run for the hills.

No, but maybe if interest rates are going up and private work might dry out, now might be a time to consider getting into some federal contracting. Or doing some partnerships with some people that do that. Just subbing work for them, whatever it takes. I’m just using an example. You go out there and you find what you do best, and you bid it and you know you’re gonna make a profit on it.

And you bid that flexibility of change. We talked about the flexibility of change a lot with the theory of constraints. And when we were talking about the supply side. But that same issue goes to every part of your accounting equation. When you’re trying to say, what risk can I take?

And the more cash you have, the more risk you can take and the more reward you can have.

Do y’all agree, or you think I’m crazy?

[00:13:35] Wade Carpenter: Absolutely. No, you–

[00:13:36] Rob Williams: I do think you’re crazy, no matter what we say, but , the subject’s irrelevant.

[00:13:40] Wade Carpenter: Yeah. You know exactly what you said. We got some people that had filed bankruptcy and, coming back from that even 10 years later and trying to get bonds is just impossible, or next to impossible.

Know how to calculate break even

[00:13:52] Wade Carpenter: But one of the points I was making about the cost structure and all that stuff is, knowing how to calculate break even. It’s a simple formula that people don’t understand, but if you’ve got X dollars of overhead and you’re making a gross profit of say 35% or whatever that is, if you take that overhead divided by the gross profit, that is the sales you need to make to actually break even.

An example would be like, if you had a hundred thousand dollars of overhead to cover, that’s not being, you know, a 35% gross margin. If you do the math on that, that’s 285,714. So if you take the gross margin being 35%, that means your cost of sales is 65%. Multiply the. 285,714 times 65%, that would give you 185,000 and change. That leave you a hundred thousand. That would mean you break even exactly. You’d make zero profit. 

And again, I know that was probably a really tough explanation to listen to, and I don’t have time to go into it, but when you start cutting margin and you don’t cut your overhead, that number goes through the roof. And that’s one of the things I wish people would look at right now.

Like you said, Monday morning quarterback, it’s easy to say what we could have should have done, but what I’m hoping people will do is take some proactive steps.

These things happen. It goes in cycles and it’s going to happen one way or another, whether it’s now or sometime in the future.

But, that’s why I think, get a great handle on your job, costing, get a great handle on your overhead, and then you can calculate this number accurately.

[00:15:34] Stephen Brown: How often should you calculate what your break even point is, Wade?

[00:15:38] Wade Carpenter: Number one, I usually advise contractors to look at your overhead rate every single year after you finish a year end. This time of year, or, when you’re concerned with something like that, maybe you should take a look at it. If you’ve added that new project manager that cost you $120,000 a year or whatever you pay them, once you start adding people on overhead, maybe you bought a building, that stuff changes the–

[00:16:03] Stephen Brown: Build own building.

[00:16:05] Wade Carpenter: Well, maybe so, but you know, those kind of things where we pump up this overhead and, if there’s major changes in it, you should probably take a look at it more than once a year.

[00:16:15] Stephen Brown: Well, like project managers, you mentioned, their salaries are eventually allocated to the jobs that they’re doing, but it is overhead. You can’t lose them.

[00:16:25] Wade Carpenter: Well, yeah. And that’s, again, going back to another point is, during the great recession, everybody wanted to believe things were gonna get better. And we all want to do that and we want to weather it. When you’ve got good people in construction or any industry, they’re worth their weight in gold. So nobody wants to get rid of anybody, but there’s a point where you hang on too long.

[00:16:46] Stephen Brown: Mm-hmm . I gotcha.

[00:16:48] Rob Williams: We definitely thought that it was only gonna be a couple of years. So, we hung onto some land. We were fortunate to get rid of some of our businesses, because we just decided we didn’t wanna be in that particular niche anymore. But it was not an economic decision. I remember dad thinking, we’ll be back out of this in two years. Not knowing it was gonna go on and on and on for so many years, but cycling through that.

[00:17:12] Stephen Brown: Seven years, Wade? Eight years?

[00:17:15] Rob Williams: Who knows how to interpret that. When were we out? When did it–

[00:17:18] Wade Carpenter: Officially in the US, it was like December ’07 to June of ’09, but also in ’09 at that point, it also kicked off a worldwide recession. But, I think there was some regional recovery, but, and I don’t know if Memphis, but here in Atlanta, a lot of that lasted a lot longer than they said.

[00:17:38] Stephen Brown: It did here, too.

[00:17:40] Rob Williams: Yeah, I’d say ours was at least five years. And, and I’d say a lot of it for us, we just sold a lot of those properties last year that were developed beforehand, for it to really swing around. So you know, a lot of it in particular niches where we were, some of them were 12 years to recover. So it just depends on what part of the business you’re talking about.

[00:18:03] Wade Carpenter: But, again, part of my point of doing this is how do we make better decisions? A lot of people wanna hold on to things and what are some of the indicators that something like this may not be getting better and we may need to do something?

Implement Profit First to get a handle on your cash flow

[00:18:17] Wade Carpenter: Cash flow can be very deceiving. One of the huge lessons I have seen was one electrical contractor in particular, they had a ton of jobs– they were commercial– ton of jobs finished up at the end of one year. I think it was oh eight or nine or something and they didn’t have anything behind it.

They had all this retainage and it all came in in oh nine, ten, something like that, but there was no expenses behind it. So–

[00:18:45] Stephen Brown: So you got numbers that are no good. And you’re trying to make a, a huge decision.

[00:18:51] Wade Carpenter: They had all this cash that came in, they got killed on taxes. They held onto their people way too long because they– Rob and I talk about this all the time about Profit First. It’s very deceiving when you’re sitting on one lump sum of cash.

And so that’s where I wanted to kind of roll into the Profit First methodology and why this is the perfect time people need to be implementing Profit First, if they haven’t done it.

[00:19:15] Stephen Brown: Because it’s forcing you to not seeing the cash that you have plonked down in your account at any moment in time. It’s forcing you to realize where that cash has to be accounted for. And if you can’t do that, you can’t plan what kind of cash you’re gonna have in the future.

[00:19:35] Rob Williams: I was just thinking about that because when you do Profit First, you get the answer to this complex calculation that you need from looking at, we’re talking about margins and overhead and breakevens. And you need to look at those, but on the flip coin of that you get Profit First, which gives you sort of the answer. Then you gotta go back and look at the other stuff to see where you arrived at that. But it’s nice to really know the answer without having to think through all that.

Stephen was just asking a minute ago, well, how often do you look at that? How often do you do that? Well, If you’re doing Profit First it’s every week. Because you’re not actually doing those calculations, but you see the result because you see how much cash is in each envelope. Each account that’s coming through there.

So you’re forced to deal with the answer to that problem. So you don’t go for two years or a year because I was just writing down some notes of what we were talking about, how we need to look at our price protection on the cost. And then the contract stuff. And then look at our cost structure of our overhead and then our margins and calculate all this stuff.

And that’s kind of stressful when you’re stressed and it adds to it and you don’t have time to do that. You’d say, well, the answer is, let me go out and do that. So all of those things that I just mentioned are rolled up into Profit First, if you’re doing the Profit First, the simplest method.

And I’d say, get it simple. When I work with people, I have to say. Look, just simplify it. The first few months they want to calculate everything. It’s like, just get the answers. Here’s the money coming in, here are the percents, put it in there. It can take five minutes to do it.

[00:21:14] Wade Carpenter: Yeah.

[00:21:14] Rob Williams: And you don’t have to take an hour. And I know when I started doing it, I would calculate all of those things while I was doing it. Just don’t do it. Do your profit first, get your money in there and you see the interest and you identify that there’s a major problem. So maybe you do stay in the office for an extra hour to figure this stuff out, rather than spending all your time out on the job site, where it can just roll into a worse and worse and worse problem. Because you don’t understand it.

[00:21:43] Wade Carpenter: I wanna kinda approach it a little differently. That’s definitely a great point on all that. But, like the case I just gave, like that electrical contractor, they had no idea that they had this huge tax bill coming and they usually bought new trucks, stuff like that.

So if they had done Profit First, when all this retainage came in, they would’ve had the cash sitting there. But number two, they don’t have this cash coming into things like OPEX or your materials and supplies. 

And as you see the cash constraints from Profit First, when you start getting tight in that OPEX, and you start having to borrow it from your own pocket, that is the best way for people to say, hey, I gotta start doing something. 

If you keep those percentages like they’ve been, it’s naturally going to constrain your cash and you’re gonna wake up and say, hey, I gotta do something. Whether you know this overhead number or not, you’re gonna see this money going out for all the people in the office or that really nice truck that you bought that you really didn’t need.

[00:22:43] Rob Williams: It’s saying I’ve got a problem. You’ve got a problem. Just think about it, especially when you do the truck. I can think of times we didn’t know we had a problem until three months after it’s too late to do anything about it.

[00:22:56] Stephen Brown: So even though you think you’re healthy and you’ve got your act together, are you saying it’s healthy to say I got a problem and then go find out what it is? Because it’s something you need to do. We’re not trying to make everyone paranoid. But just make people realize. Wade you’re right, there are just things that hit you and broadside you that you need to know about.

[00:23:19] Wade Carpenter: Well, again, the–

[00:23:20] Stephen Brown: Unexpected tax bill. Renting versus buying equipment vehicles. What do we do? You’re the person they’re gonna ask.

[00:23:28] Wade Carpenter: Well, and all my advice about the overhead and job costing, if you don’t do any of that, but you got the Profit First methodology in place and you’re allocating it, you’re naturally gonna wake up when things start going down.

[00:23:41] Stephen Brown: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:41] Wade Carpenter: And once you start wrecking the structure and having taken outta your own pocket, people wake up.

[00:23:47] Stephen Brown: Right. And as a contractor, you have good jobs and bad jobs. You do. It’s just a fact of life. But if you have cash in the bank to weather the storm, every single time you have a bad job, it makes you an expert on accounting and job costing because you’re like, whoa, I’m not letting that happen again.

[00:24:12] Rob Williams: Yeah.

[00:24:12] Stephen Brown: You just can’t blame it on anybody else. Now you can certainly blame it on the economy. By the way, contractors, if you’re meeting with a bond underwriter and they ask you about money you lost on a job, it’s the weather. That’s the standard–

[00:24:24] Rob Williams: Yeah.

[00:24:25] Stephen Brown: It’s the weather.

Cash reserves allow you to take advantage of opportunities

[00:24:29] Rob Williams: Right. I heard a great point made the other day about, you were talking about needing the cash, but they were talking about how so many of these businesses, it wasn’t necessarily just construction, but it was like, they got lucky. They got lucky and well, they started doing, I think it was Jim Collins, not Phil Collins, the band. Jim Collins, the book writer.

So, they did a study and they said, okay, what is making people lucky? And it turns out there was a huge correlation between the amount of cash people had and luck. Having extra cash funds ended up making people, quote, lucky because they were there to take advantage of that lucky opportunity where if you don’t have the cash– and a lot of those lucky opportunities are during the recessions.

So, so that’s when they quote got lucky. But the point was, they weren’t really lucky. They had done really good cash management, so they had cash. So they were able to act on that.

[00:25:24] Stephen Brown: Yeah. Be bold when you have to, and be wise when you have to restrain things a little bit.

[00:25:32] Wade Carpenter: There’s natural ups and downs in the economy and there’s gonna be a drought at some point. If you’re at a point where you’re healthy, you should be stacking cash back and no better time to do that than the present. And I know Rob and I had actually talked before this show about possibly doing a series on this, so maybe we’ll do some follow up episodes.

[00:25:54] Stephen Brown: Do we also need to tell everybody to hoard diesel fuel and toilet paper?

[00:26:00] Rob Williams: Right.

[00:26:01] Wade Carpenter: Quite possibly.

[00:26:02] Stephen Brown: Yeah. We need survival dehydrated food and… but you know, it never hurts to think that way. You don’t have to be obsessive about it. But construction industry noticed in COVID, it’s a vital industry to the economy. It cannot stop. It just cannot. And it was considered vital. 

And I think that’s what got a lot of us through the COVID and some contractors say, I actually made a little bit of money during the COVID. And then we had other contractors that just made money because of the loan. But nevertheless, they’re a little bit ahead. And then if they let the supply chain broadside ’em or sign some bad contracts that can take all that away pretty quickly.

So work smarter , not harder. And our motto has always been, you don’t know what you don’t know. And Rob, you added a new one, just keep it simple. 

Hey, my 95 year old stepfather gave me some good advice yesterday. He said hey, chill. Just be cool. And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, you heard me. I said, what am I worrying about something too much? And he goes, you heard me. And I guess that’s the best advice we can give everyone. You can’t think when you’re stressed. Like you said, Rob. When you’re so stressed that it’s stressful was a good comment.

[00:27:23] Rob Williams: That’s so true. And all this analysis that people choose to go through and they hire us, they tend to hire us when they got the time to do this and they wanna go through and it’s like, when you need this, you’re not gonna be able to think clearly like we’re doing right now.

[00:27:38] Stephen Brown: It’s like looking up in the yellow pages for a good attorney, it’s too late.

[00:27:43] Rob Williams: Yep. Yep. That’s right.

[00:27:46] Stephen Brown: Well, guys, I hope our listeners enjoy these great points and Wade, thanks for your insight because all we can do, the three of us, is hope you’re listening, hoping you’re getting something out of it. We’d still love more feedback.

[00:28:00] Rob Williams: Go to Contractor Success Forum dot com or go to Contractor Success Forum on LinkedIn and pose us the questions, contact us somewhere. What are your problems? Do you have any stories? I’m writing a book right now, Pumpkin Plan for Contractors. And let me hear your stories. 

We’re doing workshops and doing a lot of things. We may actually add the theme to some of these workshops about recession proofing as we’re coming into this new inflationary time period. So look us up. Give us feedback at Contractor Success Forum! 

And contact Stephen Brown, McDaniel Whitley bonding and insurance agency, and Wade Carpenter, Carpenter and company CPAs and I’m Rob Williams. IronGate Entrepreneurial Support Systems. And ask us some questions see how we can help we’re here for you. And we really appreciate you listening. 

And we appreciate the numbers going up. I’m getting these little reports, so. Thank you for subscribing and thanks for listening. And we’ll see you on the next Contractor Success Forum.