Leading the Race to Bridge the Skilled Trades Gap with Geoff Dodge

Yeah, normally you don't hear people kind of go from race car driver to something else to construction.

And do you feel like now that you're in it, it's like, why the need, I guess, to try and solve this skills gap, right? Like, let's touch on that.

I mean, a huge part of our conversation and before this one even kind of came on, we were talking about, you know, Mike Rowe and that podcast as well too.

And we kind of touched on it there as well.

It'd just be interesting to know what are we missing here?

As lamb excavating kind of started to be a thing and grew and we went from building paver patios and fixing the odd sewer line to doing work for large builders and contractors and trying to grow our business, felt like we were struggling to find good people.

And we were definitely struggling to find young people that had potential to solve problems difficult problems.

I mean, before I started doing the work, I guess I didn't realize just how technical it is and what sort of creative problem solver you need to get through what even is a fairly simple project.

And I felt like we were...

I mean, I hate to say it this way, but we were forced as a newer company that was trying to find its feet, that we were using everybody else's recycled garbage and having... pretty recycled garbage results.

So I looked back at my own story and you see the traditional, the way that we've done it for the last, what, 40 years maybe, that if you struggle in a traditional academic environment, maybe you ought to go to trade school.

And if you're going to have a successful career, you got to go to college.

And I thought, what would it take to to find a younger version of me to say, wait, I'm going to choose this industry.

I'm not going to fall into this industry.

I'm going to choose it and I'm going to be proactive about it because I have an interest.

I've always had an interest in it.

And the only thing I could think that kept me from choosing it from day one was the fact that I didn't realize there was as much opportunity here as there was.

And I wanted to stay in Indiana because I wanted to find a way to keep racing, wanted to own my own program so that I wasn't beholden to a car owner who has 10 people calling him every week, trying to steal your seat.

And so we built the business with the goal of being able to put my own stuff together to race.

And it took six years and we got there.

And so I kind of just stood back and looked and was like, man, I have a platform.

I have my own success story.

And if somebody had walked into my middle school or high school and said, this was my dream and this is what I was able to build in construction, I'd have been all in.

Okay, you might realize that Jeff looks a little bit different, and so do I, if you're watching this on video right now.

That is because the first little bit of the podcast, we had some technical difficulties, and now the second part of the podcast, we are back again.