Taylor Reed joins us for our 15th episode of Making it Work in Montana. Taylor is a 4th generation Montanan and is a focused and disciplined businessman. He owns and operates three different businesses – Reed Painting, Reed Construction, and Reed Coatings. Taylor spent his formative years in the valley mastering taekwondo, mixed martial arts, and boxing, competing at the highest level including being ranked in the Top 80 in the world and occasionally getting in the ring with Top 10 world competitors. He applies many of the principles learned in his boxing career to his business, saying “Business is My Sport.” Listen carefully to what he has to say – there are life-altering tips sprinkled throughout.
Making it Work in Montana – Ep 15 – Taylor Reed
Speaker1: [00:00:00] Welcome to Making It Work in Montana. My name is David Boye. I’m your host. And we are now in our third year of putting out great podcasts on All Things Montana and living here. And today we have our 15th episode and our guest really exemplifies why I’m excited soon to retire in Montana. And I only mention that because he’s half my age, but he’s probably gaining on me in success and I’m excited to hear from him. I’m obviously very old, but he is succeeding, young guy. He was recommended to me by one of my employees of about the same age, and he’s doing a lot of great things in Montana. So today I will be welcoming Taylor Reed and Taylor as I introduce you. One of the things we like to do right at the beginning of the podcast is just have you walk us through kind of your life journey leading up to where you are right now, even going back to where you’re born and all that. And just kind of bring us up to speed on how you ended up in your current situation. So, Taylor, welcome to Making Work in Montana.
Speaker2: [00:01:10] Well, thank you for having me, guys. I’ll try to be, I guess, brief and give some context to where I’m at. Born and raised here, third generation Montana, third generation tradesmen as well and been in grew up in construction, working with with my dad. The first jobs I had were in and around construction here. And we’ve we’ve been here for for quite a while growing up here is heavily involved in martial arts, which gave me some of the discipline needed to to push myself in the trade. So I was very thankful for the coaches. It’s very, very blessed to have some, some good direction, which was awesome and really appreciated my parents pushing me. I feel like the discipline has been the key to pretty much anything I’ve done in my life because it doesn’t matter what it is I’m moving into. That’s kind of the key defining element. If you can’t be disciplined in what you’re doing, you might be the smartest guy or the most hard working guy. But if it’s not consistent and disciplined, you don’t go very far at it. So I just say that to give a little bit of context, I feel like I’m kind of a born entrepreneur. I have a hard time working for other people. I use the phrase with some of my my employees. You want to get to the point where you’re essentially unemployable. You’re you push too hard to try to innovate to the point where you can’t do anything but work for yourself. So if if I were to work in Costco, let’s say, for example, I very soon would have to be a third party shipping and delivery guy because I would look at the system and go, How can I improve on that system? So I think that’s kind of the mindset of the entrepreneur is essentially how do you solve problems? And I grew up watching my dad solve problems and he did it very well in construction and a plethora of things.
Speaker2: [00:02:50] The very skilled tradesmen and those mentalities have brought me to where I’m at now. I competed in martial arts and taekwondo first became a black belt in Taekwondo. I ended up going to nationals 11 times and medaled seven times. I ended up becoming a three time national champion in Taekwondo. I was ranked top 80 in the world. At one point I was on the Amateur Athletic Union National Team and fought a lot of top ten and top 15. Top 20 guys in the world competed in Spain for that and then ended up getting into kickboxing, mixed martial arts and then boxing, which is my passion. So I’m a state champion boxer, Golden Gloves boxer. And all of those things have kept me, I think, on track and pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. So when I really pushed into the construction realm, which is where I’m diving into, I was I had a base that was developed just through literal blood, sweat and tears and through the coaching that I’d received. So I hope that that kind of gives a brief synopsis, gives a little context to, to some of the questions that I can answer here.
Speaker1: [00:04:01] That’s awesome. So just to step back just a little bit, tell us what business you own and just a little bit more about your business. And then I want to follow up a little bit more on some of that background that you just brought up.
Speaker2: [00:04:16] So currently we have three businesses. I have read Construction Reed Coatings and Reed painting. Reed painting is our primary business. We do custom home re paints. We do a variety of different coatings, epoxy, epoxy countertops, interior, exterior painting, roof repainting. We specialize in in a lot of different coatings. And then we have reconstruction where we do some high end remodel for people that are trying to get ready to sell their home. There’s a there’s a market for that here, for sure, where someone needs someone that’s reliable that can do a lot of high end work for them in a short period of time. And then we have our Reed Coatings. We are getting ready to move into Sera coating. So we currently have all the materials and research coating, non firearm based materials, but we’re working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF, as it’s known, to get a manufacturing license to serve firearms at scale. So that’s the the next step that we’re we’re making in our evolution as a company. So primarily those those three companies.
Speaker1: [00:05:18] And then he said three generations of Montana. So is that like all in the Flathead Valley or is that over the state of Montana? Or maybe just give us a quick background of like some of that lineage of your family growing up here in Montana.
Speaker2: [00:05:33] So on my my dad’s side, they had some some land and here in in the Flathead and they actually go back another generation that’s I guess would be for. And they came from Minnesota, which was same place my mom’s side came from. So on her side, the Stolberg side, a couple of people might be known here or Steve Stolberg with Stolberg CPAs, you might know Keith Stolberg, he’s sheriff’s deputies, the longest serving sheriff’s deputy in the Flathead. So we have a large family here in the Flathead. We’ve all been here for three or four generations. And then beyond that, on my mom’s side, we came from Scandinavia as as immigrants. And on my dad’s side, they came from Wales and Germany’s immigrants. So we immigrated over part of the American dream and now we’ve been in the Flathead for a while and everyone seems to love it because we were all here.
Speaker1: [00:06:27] Well, it sounds like good stock. I have heard a lot of the names you mentioned. As long as I’ve lived here, I’ve lived here since 96. And so you’ve had some good people to learn from growing up. I’m going to talk a little bit about the business in a little bit, but I was just kind of surveying some of your social media presence and on your LinkedIn, you’re not too active there, but you had a quote on there that I really enjoyed. So I want to have you dive in a little bit because I think it gets at who you are. You wrote as your tagline there Business is my sport and hearing about all the things that you just said you accomplished, can you just explain that concept of business is my sport?
Speaker2: [00:07:10] Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s to me, one thing I’ve noticed is that when you’re in a survival mindset, you don’t perform as well. And to give a brief analogy, if you’re in, let’s say, a boxing bout and you’re just in survival mode, you’re not able to think a couple of steps ahead to set up footwork, positioning, to submit your opponent because you’re simply just trying to survive the onslaught that’s there. And business to me is the same way. If you’re just trying to pay the next bill, you’re living paycheck to paycheck. I’ve been there. It sucks and it’s a very difficult place to be in. So when you look at it from a sporting perspective, where I’m trying to think three or four moves in advance to further my position to submit my opponent, which might be buying your house, it might be growing your business, it might be adding on another employee, it might be buying that piece of equipment. I look at it from a standpoint where obsessive about something that I like and I’m passionate about versus how do I just survive the moment. I don’t think good decisions are made out of out of that.
Speaker2: [00:08:11] And that’s something that I’m continually trying to rewire in my own brain, because I think that the mentality there, you know, everyone talks about mentality and how that’s important, but it really becomes important when you hop into business because that is the skill set that is going to differentiate you between you and the employee, because the work can be done. A lot of times the work that can be done by an employee, while it might be complicated and might take some training a year or two of training, where you start to move into the higher paying skill sets is where you see the mentality shift between the employee and the self employed and the risk that they’re willing to take and the tolerance that they’re willing to take. And that is a direct correlation to sports. Anyone who’s played sports at any level sees that that correlation immediately. So that’s a reminder to myself to try to keep it in a sport aspect, because I’ve found that I that’s bred the most success for me is that kind of, I guess, answer to that question.
Speaker1: [00:09:05] Oh, yeah, absolutely. So your business, from what I understand, is relatively new because you’re a pretty young guy. Some of the companies that you are either directly or indirectly in competition with may have been around for years. And as I survey the landscape of being an employer right now, most of them say it’s extremely difficult to run a good business right now because of employee issues and supply and demand issues and just so many things going on right now. But from what I gather, you’re navigating all that. So I’d like you to dive in a little bit about how you’re attacking that, because you’re definitely not operating in an environment where everything is going your way, but everything seems to be going pretty well your way. So dive in a little bit about how you do that. You have people that you might be competing against that have been doing it for 30 years. You’ve been doing it a few years. Talk about that a little bit.
Speaker2: [00:10:03] Absolutely. And that’s one of the first things that I heard when I told people that I was going to move into the space is some of the direct competitors have been around, their company has been around twice as long as I’ve been alive. And that’s that’s something that I don’t undertake without serious consideration. It’s to me is the same way I would approach a fight. There are people that I know that have 100 fights more than me, but that doesn’t mean that I still can’t beat them. And I say that not as an arrogance piece, but I know because I’ve done it. I’ve gotten into the ring with people that have more experience and I look at it the same way, and there is a certain measure of self confidence and self esteem that you have to have in order to do that. And it is difficult, but it can be done. And yeah, there’s a lot of challenges. The best thing that helped me approach that is I read a book called Ten X by Grant Cardone, which was fantastic. And one of the things that was discussed in that book was everybody is going to have problems.
Speaker2: [00:10:56] You might as well pick big ones if you’re going to have them. And my problems, I want to be I’m paying 30 million a year in property taxes, not what do I do with 30 million? And those are those are bigger problems to have. And they’re problems of I can’t find an employee. That’s a small problem. That’s in most of them when you look at them in a macro scale are easily fixed. So if I want to train employees, better go sit down and take ten people to lunch. That train employees go make 50 calls. People who train employees. And a lot of times people are willing to give you information that otherwise you would have to pay for. So if you’re willing, that’s a small problem to have. So I think that the reframing of the question of what are my problems is probably the most significant piece to that, because then it becomes very easy to tackle them. You see just how finite and small those problems really are.
Speaker1: [00:11:46] So I think I might have heard you say something that we believe in the mortgage space. But when you were looking at the problems in front of you in the mortgage space, I own a mortgage company, but we think that volume fixes everything because then you have the stuff going on to fix problems. Is that something you agree with as well?
Speaker2: [00:12:07] Absolutely. What I talk about with my guys is keeping your pipeline full. And I think the lead generation and the quantity of leads coming in is something that every company needs to address because it gives you the ability to say no. A lot of people go into business and they’re not actually negotiating. If you can’t say no to a deal, it’s not negotiation, it’s desperation. And a lot of people don’t understand that. And unfortunately, even the ones that have been in business for a long time, I was very fortunate to get to see contractors and subcontractors work in interplay with each other and the customer from a very young age. And I was able to see where customers would put contractors in positions completely unnecessary and put them at their mercy that would severely hurt them. And that contractor didn’t even need the work, but because they they were not used to the lead flow or didn’t have the lead flow coming in, for whatever reason, they felt like they had to take that job or they had to deal with that customer. And I think that’s probably the most detrimental thing that you can have in business. I know it’s been the most detrimental to me, and that’s why the volume of people coming in allows you to pick because not everybody is your customer. That’s another thing when you’re first starting, everybody’s your customer because you need to find out who’s your customer. And you know, people will say you need to find your niche, but if you don’t know what your niche is when you’re starting, you need to have 100 clients before you can figure out who you want to work with. Once that’s been established, though, the stepping block that I’ve seen for so many people is that they don’t then attack that group of people to best help solve their problems. And I think that’s that’s the key piece that gets missed.
Speaker1: [00:13:43] Well, I love how tactical you are running your business from what I’ve met over the years of people that are in the construction trades. A lot of them aren’t this way. So I think you’re at a nice advantage just because you’re actually thinking about how to run a business, not just the thing that you’re doing, like the paint that you’re applying or whatever. You’re definitely doing a business which I think is going to serve you really well. One thing I noticed just in getting to know you is that you do use a lot of the social mediums. I thought maybe we could take a moment to talk about that. I saw you had some stuff on Tik Tok and things like that and a lot of people are just that are in business are like scared of Tik Tok or things like that. So talk about how you think it actually benefits you. If it really does, if you see any benefits and how you’re using it and maybe how you want to use it even more in the future or things you’re planning to do that you aren’t even doing right now.
Speaker2: [00:14:41] What really changed my mind on this is I read a book called Jab, Jab Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk. If any, anybody who’s starting as an entrepreneur that’s I would say at the top ten must read for the business. I highly, highly recommend that. I also would say, just as a caveat on the side, if you’re not reading about business, don’t don’t expect to be successful in business. I was told that the average CEO reads 60 books a year. So I’ve made that a priority. And the amount of knowledge that’s been gained from that, that has saved me from going under, it’s saved me more times than I can count. So highly, highly recommend read more. Your education is not stop when you get into business it just starts. And that was a big mindset shift. But I digress. Back to social media. It’s been an incredibly powerful tool because businesses get comfortable. People get comfortable very, very easily. For the person that’s getting paid by weekly, that is a drug that gets them to give up on their dreams. Essentially, some people are okay with that and they’re willing to sacrifice that paycheck for giving up on whatever dream they had. And for the business owner, it might be a certain level of comfort and a lot of times they will not push into the social space in order to take advantage of all the benefits of it. I was sold on this because when reading Jab, Jab, Right Hook, there was a Facebook formula essentially for how to run ads to be successful.
Speaker2: [00:15:56] I did it. I ran a set of ads for a total of 1000. We generated 30 leads. I closed on three for a total of gross of 63,000 in deals, and I was a believer in it ever since then. And if you haven’t done it, I highly recommend it because that is probably the single most undervalued ROI. On advertising today with radio and TV. I don’t know my demographic. I don’t know who is reached by the platform. I don’t know what my lead generation is per cost. So there’s all these factors that I can’t control. If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t matter. So when I’m looking at ads, Facebook is our highest ROI because that’s the demographic, the platform that most of the people that can afford my services are on. We are still on Instagram. We do advertise on Instagram. We’re just starting to launch on YouTube and we just recently are on Tik Tok. I’m on Tik Tok for a different reasons. We’re just shy of about 10,000 followers, which is the amount that you have to have in order to get paid for content. I have other plans for business to sell products, their products that we’re currently working on that I’m trying to patent and then sell, and that’ll be the platform I sell them on. So I use social for certain things. You need to know what your demographic is like. For example, YouTube is 80% male in audience.
Speaker2: [00:17:09] You need to know those things when you’re trying to trying to reach someone. So I use social as a way to expand my reach, to push out and reach other people that would otherwise be unreachable. I’d have to work for a company for 20 years and then use years of networking to get the same reach. I can get into $25 ad so it allows me social to put simply as a. Ma is a leveler of the playing field for someone who’s new. And I know because it’s helped me and I’m, I guess, very fortunate that our company is proof that it works. Given the attrition rate in business for for contractors is between 70 and 90% in your first five years. And we were profitable after one. So I know that social works and that’s why we go so hard in it is because I know the ROI and it’s not going away. Facebook might go away, Instagram might go away. It’s meta. Now is the company, but it might go away. And that just like MySpace goes away. But then you move to the next platform and you keep advertising because the idea that it’s not going to matter, that social doesn’t matter, I think is a huge gap in thinking that is robbing large amounts of profit from current businesses. So that’s a long answer to the question, but I’m very passionate about that one. So I wanted to dive into a little bit of detail on it.
Speaker1: [00:18:26] That was a great answer. I actually started running this podcast because I got to meet Gary Vaynerchuk at a big event one time and he spoke about how to do this type of thing. One of the takeaways I got was to not be afraid to start the podcast, and it was kind of like if one person listens to your podcast and gets the message, that’s a better investment than a lot of the other things. And I think that’s the one thing that I got from him. And just the concept of social media is, is that control that you’re talking about is is whatever you’re doing, you can you can play with it, you can control it. I think it’s a great thing to do. We’re experimenting with it at our company and we feel like we have so far to go. But I love the way that you approach it. I want to talk a little bit. Are you still actively I mean, you kind of look really fit right now because you work hard or because you’re still working out. So are you still actively in like MMA and boxing and all that stuff?
Speaker2: [00:19:24] So I took a brief break from from training when I was really in the growth mode for the business. I’m still in startup mode. So when I was taking on employees and trying to set systems in place to to train and get them going. That being said, the discipline aspect is very hard for me to let go of. So like recently, I’ve been running six miles a day just just because just because it’s something that I need to do. It’s something that I’m motivated to do. I have taken a break from mixed martial arts. I’ve still been boxing. I’m actually trying to get on a card over in the Northwest on the 23rd of this month. And I will go back to training some jujitsu and trying to get back into the mixed martial arts space over this next year. I did have to pull away somewhat because there’s only so much time in the day. I was already working between 100 and 120 hours a week and startup mode, which, by the way, if you want to start a business, I would you should expect that’s one thing that martial arts taught me is it takes 10000 hours to have 10000 hours. And the main where that really applies in business is through your failures. When you when you make some failures and you learn from those, there’s a saying in in traditional martial arts, the difference between your black belt and your white belt is that the black belt has failed more times than the white belt has tried.
Speaker2: [00:20:42] And I know that kind of seems like kind of a corny piece of kung fu wisdom, so to speak, but it’s actually jujitsu saying that is very, very potent. And I would say that that’s a really big takeaway for me. Those patterns have stuck with me, and I’m not sure I can ever really stop in the fitness space or the martial arts space because it’s pretty ingrained in me. I think that I’m a better person. I operate better through a certain level of physical fitness. There’s a lot of plus sides. First, people take you more seriously. If I walk on to a job and someone is overweight and I’m fit, they immediately will look at me and judge me as a person that can move faster than the other person. Whether that’s true or not, they’ll still do it. There is an aesthetic appeal that people will look at and go, This person can do my job better. So there’s a lot of plus sides to just being fit, increased energy, more mental focus, self confidence, self esteem. So I would say that those are things that aside from the discipline aspect, are incredibly important. So I’d have to keep going with it whether I was in this business or not. Does that answer that question?
Speaker1: [00:21:46] Yeah, it’s a great answer. This is a slight diversion of somebody that thought of it. Listening to you explain things personally, I am scared to death to get in a ring and have somebody beat me up. Why don’t you just like explain in layman’s terms, since you’ve actually done this multiple times and I still have never deliberately placed myself in a ring with somebody who could just beat me up. And it’s one of the reasons I haven’t done it yet. So explain to me like the mindset that gets you there and some of it’s probably ingrained in things you said, but I think a lot of people don’t understand why would you get in the ring with somebody who could literally beat you up if you could just avoid that altogether?
Speaker2: [00:22:28] You know, it’s a great question and that’s a difference between training and the ring time. So nobody starts out a savage in boxing. He’s boxing is the example. I used to tell people this all the time because I’ve coached many athletes through. Through boxing bouts I had. I’ve run multiple boxing teams and people don’t start out good. So my my rule of thumb when I’m training someone is you try to push someone 10% outside of their comfort zone for a 1% increase each time. So you’re not trying to beat anybody up. The goal is to systematically teach the principles of boxing. And there’s five. You have offense, defense, counterpunch, counterpunching, footwork, and then distance and timing, and then boxing philosophy ties, all of those things together. So the goal is to teach the art of boxing because it’s not about being bigger or punching faster necessarily, or trying to beat someone up. There’s a lot of people that are kind of brawlers and knocked out a lot of those people because they didn’t understand the technical aspects of boxing and they were stronger and arguably faster and more fit than me. So when you’re training someone, the goal isn’t to beat them up. The goal is to teach them the art of how to knock get hit. And that’s that’s much different. So I would say on the training side, it’s probably much different than anticipated. You don’t want anybody getting hurt on the team. I would take it as a personal failure if anyone got hurt while they were training with me. And I’ve never had a serious injury outside of a sprained ankle.
Speaker2: [00:23:47] I’ve never had an athlete get knocked out. I’ve never, never had an athlete been stopped as a TKO. And part of that is because we slowly push them to develop them into becoming a good fighter. Now, on the flip side, getting ready to go and to get into the ring, you do have to have a switch. I feel like I can be I’m a fairly agreeable person, you know, I don’t feel like I’m a jerk. I try very actively to to hold what I would consider Judeo-Christian principles of kindness and compassion. That being said, when I get in the ring, you have to be able to flip a switch. I’ll knock you out in front of your wife, your kids, your grandma. I don’t care. I’m a bounce your head off the canvas. And it’s one of those things where I’m getting ready to go do that and in front of large amounts of people. And I don’t really care what the outcome is until after. And then I’m concerned about you. But in the moment, if you go down, you go down. That’s the whole point is to systematically pick that person apart and crush their will. And you have to be able to have some of that aggression because that you need to be able to flip on whether it be in business or in life. There are certain things you need to be able to aggressively go after and in the ring that is a mentality that is built over time that you have to be able to switch on.
Speaker1: [00:24:59] I just heard an interview with Brett Favre and he was talking about how some of the big guys that used to tackle him, the way that he would approach that partially was after they’d tackle him, he’d get up and look them in the eye and say, hey, that was a really good tackle, just a mess with them mentally because they’re trying so hard to kill him. And I got a little bit of that out of what you were just saying. And it was fascinating because it sounds counterintuitive to to do something like that. But he was he was playing the mental game and the physical game. One of the things that I saw that you had mentioned to somebody or written down was that you like to say what you feel. I think you told it to Zach, who was getting our interview set up, and you said you like to say what you think and that’s the reason that you’re self employed. And I think that’s a valuable concept. So I’d like you just to address that concept of, you know, why for you self employment is the way it is and the value of it and why you would make a comment like that. Like I like to say what I think, so that’s why I have to be self employed.
Speaker2: [00:26:05] Yeah, I think that you need to identify your personality and where your best going to fit. So some people are more disagreeable than others, some people are more conscientious than others. There’s five base personality traits openness, neuroticism. Then you have conscientiousness, agreeableness. And I think there’s one more. But your personality is built out of five primary traits, and sometimes that means that people are going to make a really great number two at a company. They’re wired for that. They’re awesome at it. They might be a very good logistics operator in a company, and that’s what they’re they’re meant for. Engineers are not usually meant to be entrepreneurs if you met an engineer, but they’re very interested in in things and not really interested in talking to people, they will sit and talk about things all day long, but they’re not really interested in having a conversation with you that might just be reiterating something they’ve been thinking about. So that person is probably not going to be great at networking with people, so you probably shouldn’t have them as salesmen. So there are certain personality traits that will help mold who you’re going to be. I can go talk to people. I have the confidence to go talk to anyone. I feel fully confident that if you put me in a city anywhere, give me six months and I’ll have a six figure business going because I’ll just go talk to people if you can network and sell things that that right there is a winning combination to forever be self employed at a six figure plus income and I have that confidence I have that skill set.
Speaker2: [00:27:30] So running my own business makes sense to me. I have a personality trait where I don’t. I’d like to be blunt and to the point, and there have been times in other places where I’ve been employed where they say, Hey, you can’t say that or Hey, that’s not nice or whatever that might be. And I look at it as I might be hurting someone by not telling them the truth that happened in the fitness environment. So I have to be self employed because I think I’m my truest self when I’m self employed and that’s a decision that I’ve made, but it’s a decision each person needs to make and I would say don’t. If you’re thinking about self-employment, don’t take that lightly because while you have freedom that comes with that self, employment equals more freedom. Also, if you’re not more disciplined, you don’t have that freedom. Discipline equals freedom. So if you decide to stay up late because you’re able to, you still have to get up early the next day and go to work. And if you decide not to, you limit your freedom with the choices that you make exponentially is more poor choices are made. So I guess to answer that, that question, my personality is. Fundamentally based on something that where I prefer freedom and I’m willing to fight for that and I have to be self employed as a result of that. In the environment that we have in the workforce.
Speaker1: [00:28:43] I can very much relate. I, I own a mortgage company and there was a moment where I, I have a similar personality to you. Not quite willing to get into a boxing ring yet, but I was looking at a job working for a bank president and he took a personality profile on me. And after he was done, he says, like, I really wanted to hire you, but I can’t because you want my job. And that job is not available. And when I read the personality profile basically said, this guy needs to go out and do his own thing. And I was like, okay. And that’s what motivated me to start my own business. So I can very much relate to what you just said. I am really excited to see what is over the horizon for you and just the way that you’re approaching things with your your planning and your your reading and your well thought out ness about just all of it. Can you look over the horizon maybe five, ten years? And even if you obviously a lot of us get that wrong, what currently is over the horizon for you so that we can keep an eye on you as you move forward.
Speaker2: [00:29:46] So I would say that I would just go directly to my goal sheet. I think it’s incredibly important to have short, mid, long term goals and those will change as you pursue them. For me, over the next five years, I won’t be physically painting at all. In five years I will continue to have the company. But my goal is to continue to push myself into a space where the skills I’m developing are the 1 to 5% top set of skills that produce the most cash flow for the company. So for me, there’s a couple of things that we currently have some some deals that we’re trying to make that I won’t disclose right now, but we are trying to dominate the painting space and I don’t think I’m that far off from it. In five years I think I’m going to move from being one of the top ten biggest accounts in the Flathead to top three. There’s only two companies that I would be competing against that I think I’m totally capable of taking. I know the owners are both. They’re awesome people, but I don’t think they want it like I want it and I have every intention of crushing them in business. So over the next five years I will be acquiring other businesses. I have some deals in place to acquire some other painting companies as well as to expand our current set of companies. I have a deal that I’m trying to set up over the next couple of years to build out tiny homes for Airbnbs. We’re looking at that. There’s a lot of people that want to build and get into the Airbnb space but don’t have reliable contractors. So that’s a problem that’s there and we’re trying to solve it. So there are some things like that that we’re moving into that are larger scale business operations that I’ll be taking the the lessons and the things that I’ve learned at the scale of my business to expand out farther as we get those down, as I try to perfect them to the best of my ability.
Speaker1: [00:31:35] Well, I’m going to be watching for that. And like I said at the beginning, as I I’m about ten years from being retired and you’re just getting started. And as I head down that road, I’m really excited to know that guys like you are going to be involved in running this Flathead Valley in Montana and however big you want to go. It’s been really exciting just to hear your principles, what you’re all about. If anybody wants to suggest another guest for making it work in Montana, we are now. This is our 15th episode and we like to hear about people who are making it work in Montana, which Taylor is obviously doing. So thank you for being with us today.
Speaker2: [00:32:16] Absolutely. Appreciate you guys having me on.
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Making It Work In Montana
