Jeff Dudan
speaker
309 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jeff Dudan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I had worked all the trades growing up. Chicago's a union town, so concrete construction. I worked for a moving and storage company. And one of the summers, I worked for a painter. And that's a really low barrier to entry business. And my roommate had a truck. And I'm like, hey, let's start a painting business. There wasn't anything more than, we're going to need money to stay.
At that point, it was kind of a low point with my dad's business had been failing. And there just wasn't any money. I just didn't have an avenue to get any money. So even to stay over the summer, I had to solve that problem myself. A paintbrush, a small ladder, a deposit on a job, and you're a painter. And I knew how to do it. So it was nothing more than that.
It was just, I like to say, many entrepreneurs are screwed into existence by circumstances. And I've got a problem to solve I want a case of beer a week and I want to eat and I need a roof over my head. It was just that simple.
I graduated college and a buddy calls me and we had built this very successful apartment painting business. They had asked us to put a crew together and we recruited all the athletes that were taking classes over the summer. And we would do 15 or 20 apartments in a day. And we were making real money. I was making more than the football coaches were making.
So I got offered a grad assistant football coaching job at the University of South Carolina by one of the coaches that had gone there. And he said, he called and said, would you want to do that? And I mean, I couldn't afford to live on it. Back in the mid-80s, they weren't paying assistant coaches a whole lot. So I was making more as a part-time painter. And my brother was coming behind me.
And if the resources weren't there for me, they really weren't there for him. And he was stuck. He was washing cars at Schaumburg Toyota outside of Chicago and going to that junior college. So, you know, I also had an obligation to stand up a household and be able to help them with tuition and get them through school. So this guy calls and he says, hey, this hurricane just hit South Florida.
You guys are aggressive. We need all the help we can. They basically said, call everybody you know and see anybody who wants to work. And so we went down there and cut our teeth in the insurance restoration business for 18 months. Then in 94, moved up to Central Florida to start a business with three partners that I would ultimately over the next 10 years, buy them all out,
We became a national and international government contractor, disaster restoration. We had offices in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina. And I bought my last partner out in 2004 and decided to franchise the business. So we sold all of our company stores under the franchise model in 2006, 2007, and 2008.
Launched the business in 2009 to the market, and we ended up with 240 locations, and I sold the business in 2019.
What I would say is my observation of it is my dad was working seven days a week. I was proud of him actually at the time.
But when I look at it in hindsight and I realized that on client days that he would make me put on a sport coat and go sit in a cube to act like he had employees, I'm looking at it and they were a little overprotective over that snack box that you were supposed to put money in. I mean, if something got gone,
Somebody was in trouble and I was a kid and I was hungry, but I didn't really realize in a way it was a failure, but in the other way, him and his partner ran that business for probably a decade. or longer. And then when he closed the business down, he did work for the clients from home. So he was still an independent contractor.
And then ultimately he took a job with a big company to get benefits and pension and whatever. And that's where he finished his career. But I didn't look at it at the time as a failure. I just knew that he was in business for himself.
Look, I wasn't a good partner. I didn't understand what partnership was. Good agreements upfront head off bad disagreements down the road. And you need to understand when you enter into a partnership, are you an investor, an advisor? Are you the operator? Are you going to sign an employment agreement? Are you going to run this business?
You have to get absolute clarity around how things are going to go. And I think we went into this business and we started it up and there was a real interesting negotiation when we started it where these two guys were University of Florida graduates. They were older than us by a decade or more. They had a lot of experience and we were kind of the young kids
rising stars or whatever in the in the field and they wanted 51 of the business and my sense of it was we shouldn't do that because we're going to lose control so i said look it's a 50 50 business it's 25 four ways and we'll let you brand the company in the florida gator colors So I traded that for that 1%.
But it's actually, now if you think about the succession of the negotiations that went on, that was really important percent because it wasn't a year and a half later where one of the partners just wasn't showing up and was one of the older guys. And he was getting into it with the other guy and it wasn't working. So we had to buy him out.
And then my partner that I started with, it was the same thing. It was a lack of alignment, lack of performance, lack of showing up. And the reality of it is we didn't negotiate who was responsible for what before we started. People just act in the way that they perceive that they were going to have to contribute. And then there becomes these disagreements. So
If you want to have a professional outcome, you've got to design professional partnerships. And if you're not going to operate the business, then don't even pretend that you're going to operate the business and make sure that the business has the operators that it needs and the contingencies that it needs. And people are agreeing.
Another problem you get into with partnerships is if money needs to be put in. If there's three people, you're reaching for your wallet and they're reaching for your wallet. You know, that's the problem. Like, you know. The rubber hits the road when it's time to write a check. That's when it really, do you really believe in this? Are you really committed? Are we really all aligned?
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