In this episode, Skyler Garman shares his journey from zero knowledge in asphalt to building a thriving, year-round business that combines asphalt, real estate, and innovative management strategies. Discover how he leverages technology, team building, and smart marketing to scale efficiently.
Episode 19: Why Smart Operators Build Around Seasonality with Skyler Garman
Would you buy an asphalt business with almost no experience? That’s what our guest did, and after he learned the trade from the ground up, he started investing in real estate. We talk about the messy, smart, and very real process of building a seasonal business that doesn’t stay seasonal for long.
Skyler Garman joins Save to Zero hosts Mike and Zach to share how he went from knowing absolutely nothing about asphalt to running ProSeal PA, a growing business based in Pennsylvania. He talks about why he chose an industry he believed was stable, how he learned the trade by doing the work, and how the company slowly grew from sealcoating to patching, paving, commercial work, and beyond.
Asphalt in the Northeast comes with a short window for work, but Skyler quickly realized that taking six months off sounded better in theory than in practice. Instead of laying people off and hoping they would come back, he started using real estate projects to keep skilled crews busy in the slower months.
We dig into how Skyler structures his team, including remote sales leadership, daily huddles, outside reps, crew leads, and admin support. He shares how he finds talent in a tough labor market, why he uses recruiting partners, and why his team’s recruitment strategy often focuses on winning over the contractor’s wife first.
Plus, we talk about the value of referral marketing, repeat business, commercial clients, and why answering the phone still has a competitive advantage. You’ll also learn about AI and automation in the asphalt and real estate space.
“Velocity is everything to me. I’d rather keep money moving.”
“People don’t need it done right this minute. They just want to be answered, communicated with, and put on a schedule.”
“My mantra right now is: how do we get more and do less?”
Skylar Garman is the owner of ProSeal PA and an avid real estate investor based in Pennsylvania. After starting his career in retail sales and sports nutrition, Skyler moved into the asphalt industry with no prior experience, drawn by the stability, demand, and opportunity in a market filled with poor operators.
Today, he runs a growing asphalt and maintenance company serving residential, commercial, and municipal clients, while also using real estate to keep his crews active during the off-season.
Find Skyler Garman on Instagram
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[00:00.1]
I keep saying, I look in periods of life, it's hard for me to say, oh, 10 years, 15 years. Like, it's just not, realistic. So much happens in five. So like, for the next five years, right, Like, I'm very much committed to just do this more. And how do we. My mantra right now is like, how do we get more and do less?
[00:18.4]
I just want to do a lot of that. Most people think saving money is the answer, but the truth is saving only gets you to zero. Join Mike and Zach as they flip the script from saving to earning from zero to unlimited potential.
[00:36.2]
Welcome to Save to Zero. Okay everybody, welcome to episode number 19 of the Save to Zero podcast with our buddy Skylar Garmin. Skyler, thanks for taking some time to, hang out with us today. How you doing? Good, man.
[00:53.5]
Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Awesome. Fantastic. So now Skyler is part of a mastermind that we're in and he has a growing asphalt company as well as, a real estate portfolio or a real estate company that he has as well, where he purchases, repairs and flips sells single family homes.
[01:15.4]
So we're going to kind of go over things and we're going to see what he's got going on. Skylar is definitely somebody who is not focused on saving. He's focused on growing. Before the show started, we got some background on him, so we going to find out what he's got going on. So Skyler, 50,000 foot view.
[01:30.7]
Tell us about yourself. 30 seconds or less. That's it. Go. Got it. So yeah, started off, I did not start in this world. I started off in products, retail sales, in sports nutrition. From there there was ups and downs. I wanted predictable revenue and I just honestly looked at industries that I thought were stable and they didn't change and there was just bad operators, which was a window of opportunity for me.
[01:54.0]
I landed in asphalt. Real estate has always been part of life per se, but wasn't, a large focus or push. I did a couple deals a year, and since changed that and focused more with the real estate from the asphalt. Money and stability. Awesome.
[02:10.7]
So you said that you went into asphalt because you thought it was a good recession resistant industry. From what I get, what is it that made you, how much did you know about asphalt before you got into it? Absolutely zero. I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing about asphalt.
[02:28.3]
Everyone, you know, they were like, so asphalt, you're gonna do that? I'm like, yeah. They're like, why? Like I'M like, I don't know. I just thought it was recession resistant. And, you know, it was. It was a good industry, so knew nothing. How'd you get started? For what it's worth? Go ahead. I'm sorry, Go ahead. How'd you get started?
[02:43.7]
Like, okay, your company's name's Pro Seal. Do you do seal coding? Or do you, like, pour new driveways or, like, how did you, like, I assume it takes equipment to do this. Like, how did you. How did you go about this thing? Yeah, so previous, company, I was leaving, you know, I was shutting down and kind of moving on to streamline line my life at that point.
[03:03.1]
You know, real estate was still a very integral part of my life. And that was a lot of, you know, large sums of cash for me. And I was always smart with my money. So I had money set aside and I was just looking industry to industry. And at this point, like, I did live a very passive life.
[03:18.5]
Like, I could be on the beach and I could make predictable revenue, and I absolutely had to do nothing, you know, at this point in my life. And I text a few of my buddies and I'm like, hey, you know, I think I'm gonna do some asphalt. And they're like, what?
[03:33.5]
They're like, bro, you don't even gotta get out of bed. Like, why? Why would you do that? I'm like, yeah, like, I dropped 20 grand on a rig. Like, maybe I make some, like, nice side cash on the weekends because I'm just, like, bored. And, one of my friends, you know, at the time, he texted me, he's like, hey, don't do that. I know a guy.
[03:49.1]
And I'm like, what do you mean, you know a guy? He's like, he's got a truck for sale. He's like, well. And if you know this individual, like, he is very. He's very quick to downplay things to get you in on it. So he's like, he's got a truck for sale. Just talk to him. Next thing you know, I show up and he's like, got this already established business.
[04:05.7]
You know, so it's definitely was not just a truck. And he's like, yeah, I think we should buy this. And I'm like, no, like, I was talking about spending 20 grand on a rig, not buying a business, bro. So, yeah, it started in ceiling. It was a seal coating company.
[04:21.4]
I purchased the business. Now it's like about six years ago. It was husband and wife, two high school kids, and he had what I thought was possible. The start of what I had was possible. But he was just a bad operator. He couldn't get out of his own way. Control freak, you know, needed to be on every job.
[04:37.1]
Very, very. Just like, it was that he was a marine, so it was that marine mentality of just like, I can do this. I got everything. I'll carry the entirety out of the back. And he wasn't a good delegator. Gotcha. So you started with the seal coating. Where did you go from there? How did you get to actually doing asphalt from, you know, dirt work?
[04:53.3]
My knowledge base of how did I even learn the trade? I in inadvertently to a normal company purchase. I worked for the owner for six months instead of the owner working for me with the purchase to train me. So for about six months I worked, I looked back and I made a really bad deal.
[05:10.4]
I just didn't care at the time because I didn't mean the money. But, like, reflectively I looked back and I was, I. I forget what my payment was, like 15 bucks an hour. I was like, cool, whatever. Like, I don't care. You own the business and he's. He's paying you 15 buc hour.
[05:25.5]
Yeah, I don't care, bro. Like, you know, it's like, I don't. It's. I'm not working for the money. I just need. I need to know what you've known for the past 20 years in six months. So, like, the money was nothing to me really at the time. It was just like, whatever. But, like, I realized I messed up, you know, Like, I was working 100 hour weeks and, you know, doing the thing.
[05:44.9]
But my first introduction was like, we get to a large HOA project sealing. He hands me a broom and he's like, want to learn how to Seal? Go seal 100 driveways. I'm not touching the broom. And I was like, oh, okay. And like, he just yelled at me the entirety of the time until I sealed 100 driveways.
[06:00.9]
And by the 101, it was like, perfect. And he was like, great, now you know what you're doing. And, this went on for a few months and he then mentally checked out. So we were like, I was only supposed to like, actually close the deal on the 1st. We had a written agreement with the closure on the first. He, was just checked out and he became more of a nuisance than anything.
[06:20.4]
So, like, we eventually got to the point. I'm like, hey, what's the number for you to leave, like, right this minute? Like there was about six, eight weeks left of the season and he threw us. It was something like, I don't know, 34 grand or something. Just like, where'd you get that number? He's like, I don't know, it just sounded good to me.
[06:36.1]
And I'm like, great. Wire sent. See you. Bye. It ended up working out like to the, at that point we ended up getting like the largest project they ever did was like 560,000 square. We got like a 650,000 square foot project. So like the numbers ended up shaking out.
[06:52.8]
We got got it done. But yeah, that was my knowledge base. But in asphalt industry, they all lead to one another. So like maintenance would lead to, you know, crack filling, and then crack filling would lead to painting if we're doing parking lots. But then when you're doing the maintenance, there's a pothole and next thing you know, you're doing a one by one pothole.
[07:10.5]
And you know, in the beginning it was like, throw the mix in the hole and just compact it down and do it. And then it was like, well, we're going to buy a saw now. And you saw, cut the hole and compact it. And it was like, okay, now we're going to start doing large patching and you're doing a 10 by 10 patch. And you're like, okay, we're going to do this large patch by hand.
[07:26.4]
And then next thing you know, you're killing yourself with wheelbarrows. You're like, man, a small little paver would be great to just do these little pools. And next thing you know, you're doing patch paving and you're like, wait, I have this little paver. Like, I could rip a few driveways with this thing. So it's just so progressive, but all the way uphill.
[07:43.6]
You know, it gets to the commercial paving aspect of things. So how did you progress from just sealing them? Like, where did your education come to actually laying asphalt? Did I miss that? It started. I mean, a lot of it was, you know, I can't say I cowboyed it a lot of the time.
[08:02.0]
Like I was like, all right, asphalt, watch YouTube videos, do the thing. And, I learned how to patch and then I did it really bad. And where I actually did get good experience was I hired experience. So, you know, I did definitely some aprons and patching and I was like, I hate this most miserable thing.
[08:19.6]
How do guys make money doing this? Like, this sucks. And they're like, I did, I hired a guy with some Experience. And we did some patchwork, and I'm like, oh, shit. Like, this is pretty easy. Like, you're like, yeah, when you know what you're doing. And I'm like, oh, okay. That's hysterical.
[08:36.1]
So, well, let me ask. How many employees do you have today? How many trucks do you have? So we sit, like, peak season. We're like 15 employees. And it varies between four to six crews, pretty much. It just depends what we're doing. That's fantastic.
[08:52.7]
So what do you do during the off season? Real estate is the focus there. We still do some indoor stuff. We do a lot of control joint work in warehouses. We do indoor line painting. So we'll strength warehouse facilities, those type of things. But real estate has been the entirety of the focus.
[09:09.2]
The constraint in, a northeastern asphalt business is definitely the seasonality of it. Seal, coating. That was another push. Like, there almost isn't an option if you want something that scale. I didn't know all of this. You know, I went into a blind. I was like, yeah, seasonal business.
[09:24.4]
Take six months off. Like, John used to go to the. John used to go to the, beach for six months, like in Florida for six months, work for six months. New Porsche, new truck every year. I was like, this is the life. But then when I realized I didn't want to do all the work all the time, I was like, man, this doesn't work.
[09:40.2]
It's broke. Like, the model does not, the model does not work. So asphalt takes you from, say, five, six months of the year to nine or 10 months out of the year, which, that's just the natural progression. And then you still have that, you know, that gap to close. So we have the crew and we have the guys.
[09:57.0]
They're all pretty skilled. A lot of these guys have come from construction trades. They've been carpenters, they've been painters. They've been those type of things that we've trained on the asphalt side. And I had the knowledge base sitting there, and some of these guys are getting paid salaries, so they had idle time. And I'm like, man, we could just probably take them all back to what they came from.
[10:14.9]
And I am very comfortable with real estate. It's just, you know, that is my comfort level. You know, you tell me, put money in the S and P. You know, I'm not comfortable. I don't know enough, you know, crypto. Those things, they don't attract me. I don't understand it. Real estate, I understand.
[10:30.5]
So I Switched to real estate in some of those off seasons. So your guy. So then your guys switch completely. So your crews that you're using to lay the asphalt in, working that business there are simply switching over and changing trades. Am I understanding that? Yep. That's pretty cool.
[10:47.5]
That's fantastic. That's brilliant. What a business model. That's cool because now you got them working year round. Yeah. You don't have to, like, lay them off each year and then hope you can get them back. And then that kind of screws you over for the asphalt season if you can't get good help. And that's cool. That's a great way to do it. Retain talent.
[11:03.4]
And a lot of these guys in, you know, and it was. It was our struggle in the beginning. We didn't have it the whole time. You know, we. We would cycle people. And then, like, a lot of these guys are, say, making in our area, 45,000 bucks is like the median salary for an individual.
[11:19.6]
And like, you throw out 80 grand a year and they're like, wait, what? Like, I can make 80? I'm like, yeah, you can make what you make now. But there's one caveat. We work year round here, and they're like, sold. Like, man, do you know what this can do for my family? I can buy the new truck I wanted. I can pay for the things.
[11:35.9]
I can start putting my kids in college. So it's kind of been our attraction, you know, model of. It's an unconventional benefit to, the team. Interesting. Now, do you have a goal as to how big you want to be?
[11:51.3]
I know you're in, pa, Correct. So I know that you service a certain area. Are you looking to add on other locations and really scale, or are you looking to penetrate the market further where you are? I have had all different answers to this question at all different times.
[12:10.7]
And I think with life changes with business, depends on the week. Some days you're like, yeah, I'm done with. With the week. I mean, we could say. We could say some days I'm. I question my own sanity. But, no, I, I definitely, at one point I was like, oh, I'm going to do this, you know, nationally.
[12:30.0]
And I. I very focused nationally. But then I also realized, like, even though I can do it, it's. Is the discretionary effort worth one job over there? So then I focused solely in Pennsylvania for a while, and now I'm focused coastally.
[12:45.3]
Like, the east coast is my comfort zone. I can cover the East Coast. Entirely. We can deploy. I have a very large network of contractors. Like, I do belong to some masterminds and stuff, just in this realm. I consult for a lot of clients, so I've actually been able to build my own, subs per se of, like, I get to teach them my way and I know they're going to execute a job. Right.
[13:08.7]
So if I have a client somewhere that I can't get to or something, I have someone to be able to complete it on our behalf. Oh, that's fantastic. And when you do that, are you getting a referral fee? Is that how it works? Yep, referral fees. Okay. That's fantastic.
[13:24.4]
So explain to me when you're. Let's go to the houses. When you're flipping houses, are you only flipping them in the down months for asphalt, or are you flipping them year round? We scale in the down months. But we typically try and keep something going.
[13:40.3]
Because I can't just shut down the pipeline. Right. Like, velocity is everything to me. Absolutely. I am a little, you know, again, everyone has their own rhyme or reason how they do things. I'm, velocity. Like, I rather keep money moving. I'd rather keep money deployed.
[13:55.9]
I'd rather keep crews going. And it's just understanding the scheduling of those things of. And building it into the projects that we're buying of in the season. You know, we are aiming for roughly, our construction is like 10,000 bucks a week.
[14:11.2]
So if it's 40,000 bucks, four weeks, that project will be done. We just extend that time period, in the. In season, because we know we're not going to be as quick and as efficient because we do have other things going on. So we just build those into our hold costs. So let me understand, in season, do you have guys, am I correct in assuming that one day they're doing asphalt, one day they're hanging drywall?
[14:33.3]
Seasonality is the thing here. Right? So we can lose. Last. Last year, we lost about a month and a half just on the front end. May is typically our up month, and it rained the entirety of May and the first two weeks into June. So, like, I have always been in a business.
[14:50.6]
Not always, but in this business, should I say, where the weather has controlled my income. And I just ultimately tried to get away from that. It's why I got out of snow removal. We did snow removal in the beginning, and then we had like two or three really bad winters where it was like, there's no snow on the ground.
[15:06.0]
I'm like, I got no money. You know, it's not enough for what I want to do. So, yes, to your point, they do switch back and forth. Okay. And do you have somebody? Are you involved? I know you said you didn't want to do the asphalt as far as going out there and actually doing the work.
[15:24.0]
Explain, to us how your structure is broken down within the management in the company. Okay, so, you know, I title myself as CEO. I am ultimately responsible for all things that flow up to me. I have an administrator, which is Charles.
[15:41.7]
He runs all of the accounting, bookkeeping, hr, those things. I have a sales manager. She is actually not even at our location. She's a remote employee. She's in the Carolina. She flies in once a month for some, presence based leadership with the team.
[15:58.3]
She's actually here this week, so it's fun to have her in town. She runs the sales team, 15 minute zoom, calls every morning, and, weekly check ins. She then has two infield reps, outside sales reps underneath her, which would be Chuck and Stuart.
[16:14.7]
And then she has our CSR or frontline rep that's answering all the phones and doing all tabletop quotes, which would be Kelly. And then I have a foreman that runs construction and paint. He came from the construction industry, so he knows it in and out. And then he has two guys under him.
[16:33.4]
And then I have two crew leads over on the maintenance and asphalt side that run their teams of three. That's very detailed. That's fantastic. I'm curious because they say hire a players. You got somebody in North Carolina who's running a sales team. How did you find her?
[16:50.7]
So I actually used a recruiting website that sourced her. Yeah, it's definitely. It was a lot for me to understand in the beginning, but talent for us is a constraint. I always say we live in a very weird bubble of the world. It's great because we're so central to everything.
[17:07.4]
I can be in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, you know, majority of those states in under two hours. So from a point of reach, we have great reach. But from the point of locality, everyone's good. Talent can be an hour and 20 away, an hour and 30 away.
[17:23.5]
And the commitment to make that drive every day or do the thing, it's hard to get really good talent, really local. So we had to get creative. That's very clever. Yeah. So she's checking in. How often did you stay on the Zoom call? Weekly call with you with their team?
[17:41.3]
She meets with them. She has like a What we call like a 30 minute daily huddle. So every morning between 7 to 7:30, she has a daily d. Daily huddle with the sales team. And then twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, we meet with the entirety of the company. I sit on those meetings for 30 minutes, bottom to top.
[17:57.8]
So what'd you do today? What are you doing yesterday? Any roadblocks or support those type of things we address in the morning. 80. Fantastic. So what is her background in terms of sales? Her husband was in the blue collar trades for 20ish years or something like that. 20, 30 years.
[18:16.4]
So he owns a drywall company down in the Carolinas. So she knows the blue collar trades in and out. She worked for some larger corporations. She worked under private equity for a while. She then got out and became a consultant. And now, now does her, does her thing and consults for other businesses.
[18:33.7]
And you know, it started out as a, hey, I'll give you 10. I think we hired for like 20 hours a week or something. And she was like, yeah, I got that bandwidth. And I was like, yeah, well we need 25. Yeah, we need 30. You know, eventually I'm like, hey, I understand you got other clients, but like, what is this?
[18:49.7]
How do we make this make sense where it's us? Like, I'm fine if you do whatever else you need to do, but like I need your discretion here. So yeah, so how do you find your crews and your local guys? We have you work with a recruiting company.
[19:08.1]
So we have a little trick too. This will be a trick that I can give everybody and I'll provide value to all of your blue collar trade listeners is we work with a company that actually sources are technicians, foreman and crew leads. And they typically target the individual retargeting via Facebook ads.
[19:26.2]
And the main goal is to target the wife. So we target the wife of the individual to get the buy in. So when they are putting it in at our facility, the wife is bought in and it's not a fight. She believes in the better future because it's what we believe we're offering.
[19:41.9]
How do you position that? So if your husband works for us, this is the benefits he gets. Like how do you, what do those ads look like? Culture. It's teams, right? Like today, you know, everyone was in office. I catered Chick Fil A for the team. We're all eating together, we're doing the thing. We do projects in the Carolinas.
[19:57.8]
I rent in, you know, million, two, $3 million Airbnb on the water that has a movie theater in it and has ping pong tables. And I have 10 guys in a house and there's pools in the backyard and hot tubs. And those are the pictures that we're putting out. Those are the ads that we're showing out. Because now it's, hey, this is your culture.
[20:14.5]
Be a part of the movement. Be a part of this team. Instead of, hey, my husband isn't appreciated. And he just gets told to shut up and sit in the truck. And he'll figure out where he's going when he gets there. Right. Like the husband comes home after he worked all day bitching. Yeah. So you gotta get the waist buy in. I like that.
[20:29.8]
That's interesting. In my, second company, it was a construction company in the restoration industry. And because the project managers had a certain level of stress on them, we always made sure that as part of the interview process, the wife came in and had an opportunity to ask questions.
[20:48.2]
And we found that when we did that, it increased retention considerably. Because if the wife says no, it's no. And, not only that, once we explain the whole process to her and the whole program of how they get paid, draw against commission, what people in the industry make on average, et cetera.
[21:05.1]
Then if he comes home and says something different, the wife says, well, wait a minute, that's not what said during the interview process. Explained. And it was interesting how often the wife became part of our HR team. Yeah, it was very interesting. We actually had Frontline, so that was the project managers for Frontline technicians.
[21:24.5]
We made sure that the wife was involved as well, explaining that this is a 247 business and you maybe get called on New Year's Day or Christmas Eve or something of that nature. And what we also did was at the Christmas party, at the end of the year, we always handed the wife a gift card between 100 and 250, depending on how long the employee had been with us, to thank her.
[21:49.2]
Supporting the fact that this is a 247 business. That's smart. Yep. And, yeah, you give mama some sugar.
[22:00.3]
It's cool. Okay, Zach, what do you got, bud? So where are you going from here? I mean, you're doing real estate, you're doing asphalt. What's your like, like where you see all this stuff in two years, five years? So on the majority of the goal is just autonomy at that point.
[22:16.4]
Like 100% is grow, bottom line, full autonomy, continue to scale the machine. And I would say, I keep saying, I look in periods of life. It's hard for me to say, oh, 10 years, 15 years.
[22:33.0]
It's just not realistic. So much happens in five. So for the next five years, I'm very much committed to, to just do this more. And how do we, my, my mantra right now is like, how do we get more and do less? And that's. I just want to do a lot of that.
[22:49.1]
What does that look like? Is that hiring people? Is that changing the types of jobs you do? It's a mix of all. Okay, It's a mix of all. You know, I definitely don't have the perfect, you know, handbag yet of like, I haven't have it all figured out. But there's definitely some jobs that pay significantly more.
[23:06.2]
There are some jobs that are significantly better, There are some clients that are significantly more profitable. And it's pulling on every single one of those levers until it's just like, man, this is just, it's very lucrative, it's very easy and it's, you know, it's fun. How many hours a week do you say you spend in the business?
[23:25.2]
I know you have that though. You said it was like a 30 minute zoom with your team once a week. I mean, what else besides that? I mean I still built a lot. I can go for, you know, durations of time. I was just gone for, you know, four days here and you know, everything's fine when I come back.
[23:43.0]
So it's not like the business doesn't need me, but over extended periods of time, the business would need me. But building redundancies and cleaning up some of that stuff. We're big on integrations right now of like, we had done a lot of manual work, especially on the sales side of anything that we can automate and delegate.
[24:02.1]
Like that is the motive. So when you say automation, how are you, are you using, AI in your business at all? We are, we're using AI, you know, and just more and more and more of it. Which tools are you using?
[24:18.4]
So a lot of it is takeoff stuff. Where before we used to have to send reps to every single project. We have surveillance softwares now and it can be as, as needy as real time basically of within 24 hours I can get a satellite or drone out to that position and give me a real time, accurate takeoff at 90.
[24:37.2]
I want to see their last stat was like 92.8%. Is that within your territory or nationwide? Nationwide. I can do it anywhere. I can see site conditions anywhere across the country. In our setup, we Just don't utilize it.
[24:53.3]
We utilize it coastally because it's where energy is best spent. Wow, that's fantastic. What a time saver. What a money saver. Yeah. And Like we were talking about in the last one mike of speed to lead. Like if somebody can get a quote and get you can get out to their site within 24 hours and give them an estimate, that's going to be huge.
[25:11.2]
Absolutely. So what would you say is your focus on your business in terms of mix? Are you more with consumers or commercial jobs? And which one do you prefer? We started, I would say 70, 30 consumers.
[25:27.1]
So residential. And I seen crew utilization, equipment utilization. All of those things have become numbers that I track very hard. Now I get weekly reports sent to me of like idle time, S and C time, all of those things where in residential we still have both to be clear.
[25:46.0]
But we had swapped the model so roughly, you know, I was just telling you guys the numbers here of like 63 to 67% commercial now and 30ish percent residential, it's actually like 24%. And then we have 8% other which would be some retail sales, consulting, you know, all the other things we do inside of the business.
[26:08.4]
Why the switch from commercial from residential to commercial? So it is definitely equipment utilization and crew utilization. When I looked at the business from the entirety of the beginning of, I've realized every single minute that pump is not spraying or every single minute there is not blacktop running through that paver, we're losing money, because we are very people heavy and equipment heavy business.
[26:34.6]
So millions of dollars of equipment and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of salary. So every single minute that machine isn't running, we are losing money. So I tracked those numbers and it was just build efficiencies amongst them.
[26:50.4]
And in commercial, if I have 500,000 square feet, it's one Moog and the crew works the entirety of the day. So I might be at 90% crew utilization and equipment utilization. But in residential it's drive 30 minutes to the house, work for 45, drive 15 to the next one, work for 30.
[27:07.9]
Or you know, it's I do, I pay two driveways in a day, you know, maybe three if I'm lucky. So I still have, you know, you know, triple the molds that I would on a commercial job. So we've focused a lot on that. We redesigned trucks. We actually custom built the trucks to build for efficiency like the Kaizen Lean construction model.
[27:29.0]
Everything is shadow cased and everything has a spot. Just to pick up those utilizations. That's fantastic. Do you do any government work or any city work, doing roads at all? We like municipality work. We learned.
[27:45.3]
We do not like state work. Why? That was our. It's got to be a story. That was college education. Yeah, that was a college education. I definitely, I say I've paid for my college education in many ways. And it was not through the, not through the school system. It was, it was the school of hard knocks.
[28:03.4]
Yeah. We did some state work and it was like $100,000, cost. Right. We did something and it was like, oh, it's the same thing over and over. It's just this, just paving. We do this all the time. Well, yeah, it's not just that all the time.
[28:21.0]
They hold you to a tolerance that they can't achieve and then hold you responsible for it. So state work is definitely not the funnest thing, but municipality worked. And we like privately held commercial. Now when you're doing municipal estate work, is that all bid work, where they're going with the lowest bid every time?
[28:41.0]
Not always. We typically when we target municipality work, we're targeting, either owner required work. Because a lot of, say, trucking facilities, they have triaxles blown out onto the road. Every day they destroy the road, the municipality will back charge the owner and they'll be the one responsible to complete that project.
[29:04.2]
So they're selling off of that, you know, they're getting sold off of value and relationship, unlike the traditional municipality standard. But then we also have a third party, whatever you want to say, like a pre qualification system where we get like, fine tooth comb, audited financials, insurance, you know, backgrounds, everything where we're pre vetted, where we kind of bypass the bidding process.
[29:30.0]
Okay, interesting. So when you said that background checks, how difficult? Because I know in my experience in the trades, it's pretty common to have somebody that has a record. How do you deal with that? Or you just not hire anybody with a record? We background check, we drug test and OSHA certify every single one of our employees. Wow.
[29:51.2]
Okay, so how far back are you going on the background? Well, we have a couple different options, but typically we'll do at least the last 10 or 15. I think the pool is, but it'll bring up anything. It won't give the details, but it'll say charge or whatever it is.
[30:09.0]
The last 10 or 15 is like, it'll spell out the charge. And what happened. The other ones will just say there's a charge there and then we can run a secondary search if it's something, you know, we don't worry about misdemeanors or you know, some of those things, even felonies.
[30:24.3]
As long as it's not like there are certain things that we can't have. We can't have certain things on certain sites. We do a lot of schoolwork is a prime example of that. So people would have to be qualified to be on those facilities. Yeah. When I had my construction company, it was the same thing.
[30:41.2]
I had a kid who became a manager in the company in the mitigation department and he had felony DUI because he had three of them. And it had been 10 years before we hired him.
[30:56.6]
So for something like that, he, at that time, you know, at the time he was single, doing silly stuff that single guys do. He got married, had a couple kids and there was absolutely no way that he was going out drinking. Especially if you knew his wife. That was not gonna happen. She, she had a tight rein on him and he needed it. Yeah.
[31:15.2]
Oh yeah. Before I even. It's funny, he started as a frontline technician before I promoted, him, myself and his wife and him went out to dinner and I explained everything to her because I knew that she was going to make the final decision. It wasn't going to be him.
[31:31.9]
Yep. Target the one. It was very interesting. So how are you finding a lot of your leads, your clients? Do you get a lot of referrals with commercial or are you, you know, you're using A.I. you said? And how's that work? Work?
[31:49.6]
So a mix of all we have 64% of our business is repeat. The only thing that is the model of commercial depending on the client is annualization repeat. But majority of the time if it's a maintenance we see them in three to five years.
[32:08.9]
So it takes a while to realize that gain. But they're typically referring people our outside sales reps are hunting. So they're actively calling cold calling businesses, emailing and then they're also doing drop ins. They're required to do they have KPIs for all those weekly.
[32:26.3]
SEO is huge. We are in a service based industry that is typically demand driven especially on the maintenance side of like fix my pothole, pave my driveway. So we focus a lot on direct type search engines that would then cue the client to call us and try and rank high on those Things, And that's really our kind of mix.
[32:49.7]
Do you have an outside company that's handling your SEO or are you doing that internally? We have an outside company that specializes in only, asphalt and roofing. That's all I do. Asphalt. And you find that even like doing the, like.
[33:05.8]
I'm sure if somebody's like, hey, fix a pothole in my driveway, that's a small job for you guys that, I don't know, you're probably not too exciting. But do you find it leads to other stuff often or do you just kind of do it because you want to keep your crews busy? So there's three angles to that question.
[33:25.0]
You know, again, we have our. The reason I've never eliminated residential yet and or patchwork is the cash flow. It's typically cash flow and delivery. Just about where you go do a million dollar project and It's a net 91 20. You gotta hold that for that 91 20. But.
[33:40.9]
But I can still get a crew that prints $15,000 a day with two to three guys. And it's just about almost cash on delivery. Like it just pays the bills. So it's easy. Okay. Even though they're small, they're easy enough that it's totally worth it to, you know, grind through those small stuff.
[33:57.8]
And we build the efficiencies to do that many like, guys. Guys will be like, yeah, I run a residential crew. I do three to five a day. I'm like, yeah, we do 15. On the maintenance side. On the maintenance side, for sure patching, you know, you could say a patch that's 1200 bucks. You could easily five, six, seven of them in there.
[34:15.2]
And typically, the difference is the smaller it gets, the more expensive it gets. So the price goes up significantly. Where you're paving at two bucks a foot at a large commercial scale and you're charging $45 a foot on patchwork.
[34:30.8]
Yeah, that makes sense. Do you batch the jobs where. Cause you don't want your crews to spend all day driving around between job sites. Do you look what you've got for the next week or so and try to shuffle things around so that they're close to each. Yep, we, we run like a six week schedule typically, and then we just run zones.
[34:51.2]
So we have like zone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I don't know what it goes up to now. Kelly, our CSR frontlines, she does all that. So we know we'll be in this 10 mile, 20 mile radius this day. So we book all of those jobs on that day. And then it just goes over and over.
[35:07.9]
And then if it's like, hey, we need this done now. You pay a premium. Okay. Okay. So even though. Yeah, even though, like, is that. That must be how you guys can do 15 a day where your other competitors are doing two or three. Yeah. And it's. The biggest thing is like, these guys just don't pick up the phone.
[35:23.9]
So, like, people don't majority of the time need it done right this minute. They just want to be answered. They want a quote in hand and they just want to be communicated with and want to schedule. That's a good point. Like, yeah, if I had a pothole in my driveway, you know, it's not the end of the world. But, you know, your wife keeps nagging on you to get it fixed.
[35:40.0]
You at least want to have that on the schedule. Right. You just want to say, yeah, I called the guy and he's coming two weeks from now. You. It's not an emergency. Yep. That's funny. This has become a wife bashing work, but I get that.
[35:55.6]
That makes sense. Interesting. So, odd question, probably irrelevant. What do you do if you drive up and there's a car over the pothole and they're not home? You just move on and make them wait another two weeks till you're in the area? We very explicitly give details.
[36:13.4]
And then when our CSR schedules that appointment, she says that everything's supposed to be clear and free from the area working area at 6am every morning for the entirety of the day. We don't give specific times, make sure it's off at 6:00am and expect it to be 9:00 clock at night. Night.
[36:30.2]
I'm not going to give you a window of time. I don't know. We have so many jobs, I can't tell you. But like, it will get done in this day. If there's a schedule change, we will tell you. If not, it is billed at this rate for a remobe. And on commercial jobs, like, we're just, we're picking.
[36:45.5]
We take a tow truck and we'll pick cars all day long. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. You get a parking lot. How. How are you going to wait until there's not a single car in there? There's no. Yeah, you toe majority of the time, like you shut the lot down and it's typically pretty good, but in, you know, really busy plazas and those type of things, like, there's a.
[37:06.4]
There's always cars. And I know you, I know you said you, you keep your guys busy in the winter off season doing real estate and flipping. But I would imagine your machines just sit. There's probably no other purpose you can do with those, right? Yeah, we do again coastally too.
[37:22.2]
So winter months, we typically do do warmer. We do, work in the warmer, states, and mobile, mobilize more for those type of jobs. And then we also have, like, emergency type stuff. So we have infrared machines, which, when plants are shut down, we can actually fix file holes when no one else can.
[37:41.2]
And that's typically when you're getting those emergency calls. Home Depot is really big. Lowe's targets those type of things. It's all liability for them, so they really don't care. And it's better than a cold patch that's, you know, out of the bag, but it's not quite as good as fresh hot mix. But we can kind of make. Make mini batches of hot mix, for those jobs.
[37:59.5]
Interesting. That's awesome. That's cool. And so not. Not many other people in your area do that then. Is that a unique thing that you guys offer? It is pretty unique. Like, you know, it's not a very common thing. And you can typically, you know, charge as needed of like, you know, say a 15 minute press is 400 bucks, 500 bucks, and it's as many as you can do in a day.
[38:22.2]
Wow, that's interesting. It becomes an assembly line. Yep. So switching gears a little bit to, like, mindset. Have you always been interested in business? I know you started, you've been in business for a long time, but what made you want to go through all this trouble?
[38:37.8]
You know, that's what, like. Right. A lot of people, they say, oh, people start a business so that they work 80 hours a week, so that they can not work 40 hours a week. Yeah. I mean, I would say a lot of it was just. It's probably a lot of things, and it was the maturing in those things and the life experiences.
[38:57.3]
You know, growing up, we didn't have much of anything. Like, lived in low income housing for just about, you know, over a decade. We didn't have much. I never wanted to be in that position. I've always been a very fast paced, hyper person. If you can't get the energy by now. And I wrestled for 14 years wrestling, turned into a bodybuilding career, because it was just so extreme.
[39:20.5]
Right. The extremity of the energy and the output and the discipline to me was what was attractive. And then, like, you know, as you get older, you have fun and those type of things, and, like, you know, then energies and girls and doing the thing, and it was just. Wasn't serving.
[39:36.1]
So I found business. And I've always kind of had an authoritative thing, too, that I, didn't do well with. So you mix those two together of, like, I didn't like authority. I have lots of energy, and I could constructively put that energy into something.
[39:51.9]
Well, you know. Yeah, there's a couple ways those two traits could go. Right. At least you chose to do something constructive with it. Right? Yeah. I gotta tell you, man, I started my first business at 23, because this and this don't always work together. So it was not conducive to being a W2 employee at all.
[40:10.8]
The few jobs that I had where I stayed for any period of time was where the supervisor left me alone and let me do my job. I can remember when I worked with kids that what we would do is. And we all knew it with the three. It was a residential facility, the three cottages that he was in charge of.
[40:30.0]
We all talked the residential counselors. And if you wanted to get rid of Jeff, you would ask him a hard question, and he would say, I'll get back to you. And he'd be gone for a couple of weeks. He was ducking you because he didn't have an answer to your question. Oh, we all knew it. And, you know, I don't want to see Jeff.
[40:46.8]
He's been a pain in the butt. I'm gonna ask him a question. And it was just a hysterical thing. But, yeah, working for somebody else. I'm with you, man. That's definitely not something I can do. I haven't done it since I was 23, so. And now being 25, it's been a full two years.
[41:04.4]
And I think business is a great way to go for. For people like that, because you work with all these different clients and you don't get along with everybody. But if you get along with most people in business, you'll probably do all right. If you piss everybody off, that might be a different story. Well, what I would do is I always hired somebody to deal with people I didn't want to deal with. Here.
[41:24.0]
You got to deal with that person. I just can't. I just don't want to ever see them again. If they call me, we're going to lose them as a customer, and you're making a commission. So you don't want them to call me. Yeah. That's another huge thing of business versus being an employee. If there's something you don't want to do, you can get out of it. If you're an employee, it's a little tougher.
[41:41.2]
Yeah. Yeah. And I would say young and gunning in business. Right. I was definitely. There was times where I've been like, dude, pound sand. Now it's just away from everyone, and we don't have that. And it's also like, you have bad clients, too, where it's like, look, I don't care how green their money is.
[41:58.2]
I just don't need it. It's not worth it. Yeah. I see somebody call and I say, oh, my God, this person's calling. That's a good sign. That, not a good fit. See, they're not a good fit, or I got to assign them to somebody else because I do not want to talk to them again. Yeah, it was funny.
[42:13.8]
My project managers in the construction company knew that if it got as high as me, that it was going to cost them money on their commissions because I'm just going to do stuff so that the customer will shut up and go away. I just don't have the patience for it. I don't. I can handle basic stuff, but when they start going on and on and on, it's like, okay, what do you want? Yeah.
[42:32.6]
Yep. This. Okay, you got it. Bob, just do it for me. Tell me what you want so that you go away. It comes out of your office. That's it. We're done. Out off your commission. It shouldn't have come that far. You didn't take care of it. That's not my problem. That's a way to make them handle it. That's it.
[42:48.9]
Absolutely. Okay, cool. Well, Skylar, this was fantastic. We appreciate it. Any final things, you want to say to our audience? Just so you know, it's as big as Joe Rogan's, so make sure you be careful with what you give. But, you know, give us some information if you're comfortable with how people can contact you.
[43:08.0]
You, and we'll put it in the show notes and any final, final things you want to say? Yeah. So Instagram, Facebook, Skylar. Garmin. Garmin. Skyler on Instagram. Our website, prociopa.com for any and all asphalt needs.
[43:24.2]
And, yeah, reach out. I mean, between everything, between the real estate, between any type of commercial facility, you know, typically, our target, again, to be clear, is. Is one to many commercial facility owners. I'm, typically targeting someone that's 200 plus thousand square foot and above.
[43:39.5]
And they need a preferred vendor to maintenance and, or construct their, facilities. We run into that a lot where people build. And they have all the trades, the conventional trades. Right. That travel with them, that take care of their projects. And asphalt is typically not one of them. So we like to fill that gap. Awesome. All right, man.
[43:58.1]
We appreciate it. And, we appreciate you being on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Likewise. Culture. Sh. Culture and leadership is the. Is the key to secret sauce, too. Culture. Absolutely. Right. Thanks, man.