Right.

Um, And I would just run people over because it was like, they were widgets to me.

You will do the thing I need to do or you will not, or you won't be here.

Right.

And I don't care about anything else.

And I recognized as I evolved, as I became a parent, as I had more responsibility and really take ownership of my own business, that was like, that's not how I would want to be treated, right? And it's like, I was breaking my own golden rule of like treating people how I would want to be treated.

In my life everywhere, I treat people great.

Yeah, we went from

Okay

... frankly.

I would not call what we had, like, any of that typical culture stuff.

We had a culture of accountability with flexibility.

We had standards, right? And we had integrity.

And it wasn't, like, a picture on the wall.

Culture i- as, especially as a founder, as a leader of a small business you're trying to run, you, you are it.

... topics do you cover in the book where all business owners, operators, and entrepreneurs can, can have some important takeaways?

[laughs]

It's broken.

The leadership is a failure.

Like they're, you know, their strategy's terrible.

We all know what's broken around here, but nobody actually wants to do the hard work and to fix it, 'cause we're p- protecting some leader's ego, or the bottom line, they wanna make more money.

But, you know, all these basic stuff that innately you could see needed to be fixed.

So when we started our company, we looked at the landscape and saw some competitors out there, um, were dabbling in this one space we were in.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

And that company was busy, so it's like I'd work till 6:00 with them.

I might hit a service call on my way home.

I'd wake up at 4:00 in the morning, hit a service call on the way into work.

Saturday, Sunday, I'm putting furnaces in.

Um, but there was two, like, pivotal moments that kinda like led to me starting the company.

One was I traded a used air conditioner install to get a work van, and the guy's...

Yeah.