Carter Romero
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Carter Romero’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Josh and I are originally just friends from middle school, and yeah, it's been a wild ride since then. We connected just through sports and our love for entrepreneurship. We were super good friends in high school, played sports together there, started a mowing company at that point.
We went to college, so I went to UChicago, Josh went to A&M, and then COVID hit, and that brought us back home. So we were basically just sitting at home like, okay, we've got... you know, 24 hours a day of time. And we've got five hours of zoom calls going on a day. We can put it on two X speed and, uh, basically just have the whole day of opportunity.
So at that point, I'm just looking into, uh, I'm just cleaning out a closet at that point. And I come across a bunch of checks from our old mowing clients and I just call them down the list. And I'm like, Oh, Hey man, remember us? We, we did your line when we were in high school. And, uh, You know, I called 22 of them. One of them calls us back and says, yeah, man, I've got a pathway for you.
So at that point, Josh and I just load up my parents car basically with materials from Home Depot. We don't know about this. And we just basically go and install a pathway based on YouTube education and my parents car. So, yeah, we do that one. They're happy with the final result. We beg them for a Facebook review and say, hey, ma'am. please post this to your friends. We really want to do this.
This is something exciting for our future that we could possibly carry on. they post us. We get one other person to call us. We go out there, we do a killer job. They post us and we go viral. So at this point we get 50 calls in a day. I'm out just doing what we do. I'm like, Oh Josh, this is taking off. And what are you guys doing at this point? Like what kind of jobs?
Uh, this is just pathway work. So basically like installing, like installing just bricks to make a pathway, um, putting down squares of sod in people's backyards, just doing random. And, uh, Yeah. Like I said, we had no background in this. We just wanted to be entrepreneurs and we were excited about it. And yeah, people started demanding new services of us. And somebody says, can you do turf?
We say, yeah. Can you do masonry? OK, sure. And we just start taking on jobs. And like I said, the phone was ringing off the hook. And so we start calling our friends and say, OK, the first thing we need to do right now is get people on the on site to help us. So we had a few of our friends that luckily were in the area that could help us out.
we start driving around and find some contractors that can do stuff. We're asking landscape suppliers, you know, do you have anybody that you can point our direction?
Yeah, actually the first couple of years, it was, I mean, I'm saying you guys are physically doing the labor and the first couple of years, man, we did a lot of work. So we were on our hands and knees spreading manure in people's yards with zoom earbuds in getting called on. And I'm telling Josh, Hey dude, please turn off the bulldozer. Like I've got to answer this question. So, uh,
because at that point to clarify we were still in school yeah okay i was in a and f he was in u chicago so while we ramped it up carter mentioned like hey we have so much time in our hands sorry so you guys you guys moved back home because of covid right right so that's right yeah so yeah right so sorry i was off track in the beginning so basically to restart that josh and our friends growing up we went to high school together then we separated for college i went to u chicago josh was at a and m
and COVID hits. And they say, you've got to go do online school now. We don't have a campus anymore. So that's when I moved home. Josh moved home. We're back in Austin. And at that point, I was bored. I was going through the closet, calling the checks on our old mowing clients' checks. And that's when I was asking them, hey, do you have any work for us?
So at that point, yeah, one person called us back. We did that job. Fast forward five years, we had gone through hell and back, building up a team of specialists. And that kind of brings us to where we're at now.
It was 22 initial calls and I got one guy and that job was $360. And then that spiraled into... That spiraled.
Yeah, yeah. So we were actually physically working on that job and she respected that we were outside on our hands and knees. She happened to own a remodeling business herself, so I think she knew how to... engineer the perfect review to get a lot of impressions. And she posted on an app called Nextdoor app, which has an element of virality that others may not. And so it's all neighborhood driven.
So if one neighborhood hypes it up, then the next few closer neighborhoods get that post expanded to them. And so it went to 50 something neighborhoods. And in those neighborhoods, that's where the phone started ringing.
that was probably our highest margins honestly at that point it kind of yeah over time we grew into a business but yeah at that point we're doing everything and then we would just kind of get people out there to help us actually do the jobs yeah i will say it wasn't an efficient process like we didn't have the best suppliers at that point we didn't know how to sell jobs correctly and so there were elements of underbidding or undercharging or overcharging in that time so it was all over the place it was super unpredictable and say like that first
Three years, we had no idea how much we were really making until the P&Ls came out.
On my end, I would say it's the custom nature of our projects. It's kind of hard to scale whenever every project is so customized to the client's needs. If you're envisioning a painting, if you can just stamp the same template painting over and over, that's a lot easier to create a lot of paintings than a custom painting every time.
I'm trying to find a way to standardize some of the processes and the projects themselves within Urban Oasis. I think the commercial route is one that we definitely want to pursue. The maintenance route is one that we want to pursue. There's a lot less interpretation within those sides. For sure.
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