J.J. Levenske

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141 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

J.J. Levenske’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Home Service Expert Podcast · Building a Team That Builds the Business: How to Recruit Strategically · 3 Jan 2025 podcast

Once you have that taste of entrepreneurship and when you have a successful organization where everyone tries to copy you, you can't get it out of your mouth.

so the reason i'm setting this up is that when we decided to move to arizona i struggled when i moved down here because i walked away from that we were growing we're doing great things we're doing transcending things in hr policy using technology i mean i remember we were using go to meeting and zoom type stuff long before anyone else was and we encouraged and again this was taboo we encouraged hybrid kind of work at home type environment

Think about that 15 years ago. That was like, what the F are you guys doing? But we hired the right people. When you hire the right people, that's all just bullshit. Right? Right. So move down here. And the first three years, I was just kind of a gypsy floating, doing roll up M&A type stuff. I got, I was just a headhunter, got me into that kind of thing. And I did it.

And then rolled into, I'll never forget, I was doing a roll-up and I was getting bored with it because it was in the home services business, but it basically was just a one-call-close type business. I'm not going to mention names, but it felt dirty, Tommy, because all we were selling was financing. And that wasn't my passion. My passion is at the core of me, I'm a builder.

And I just saw this and I said, nah, I don't think this is for me long-term. Was it solar? No, it wasn't. Okay, okay. It was more like window replacement, bath replacement. And it just, it wasn't that it was dirty. It just, there was no building required. That was just, it was product. Product and financing. And I'm like, eh, this isn't me. But I've never quit anything in my life.

And I've never walked away without finding a replacement. So I'll never forget one night, I'm trying to find the replacement for me because these guys were nice to me and good to me. But I didn't want to leave them hanging by just quitting. So as I was doing that, I found my current partners and Jake and Josh Simonton, who were they own Starwood Custom Homes at the time.

And we just started talking because as I was looking that night, I saw them posting something like, why? I like their marketing. And, you know, it's a testament to what you always talk about. It's like if marketing can catch you, that's the hook, right? Have something special. They're authentic. And so they caught my attention. I went and met with them.

And next thing I know, we'd consummated a deal where we actually, truth be told, Blue Wave started as school builder. And at that time, Josh and a couple other guys had started this school builder type thing. And as many people know, Arizona was a leading catalyst in the charter school space.

A lot of it has to do with, you know, the Mormon upbringing here and the strong centric values that's behind the way that religion is based on education and things like that. And the other thing is Arizona sucked at public education for so long that, you know, finally the populace was like, hey, this is the way we're going to go.

So the challenge that they presented me with is, hey, listen, we've got all these connections in the charter school space. We do the front end real estate work, the entitlement, and we'll do the back end bond financing. But there's these other GCs that are doing this, the middle part where they're building these charter schools. JJ, could you do this? I'm like, yeah, I can do it in my sleep.

So we went into a venture together under the school builder moniker where JJ here, I think I started with like $10,000 a laptop and I went and got the license. Okay. And bam, we built our first charter school that summer and then it just skyrocketed.

So that was kind of what put my name on the map here locally, because I will, without tooting my own horn or our horn, is it was a Midwestern work ethic that we brought to the valley that was different at the time. At that summer, that summer, there was five charter schools being built. And it just so happens that myself and my superintendent at the time, that's all it was.

And we're in the trailer 24-7. And we took an attitude like we would have in the Midwest, which is we've only got this amount of time to get stuff in the ground because the snow's coming. Well, there's no snow in Arizona. But we have something else called the monsoons. So here it was, I think that was the summer of 2017. We were awarded our first contract.

We built the, it was the American Leadership Academy campus right down by the Basha High School. And if I remember right, we did a turnkey, however many acres that was, 50,000 square feet plus or minus. And we brought it in in under 120 days turnkey. Wow. And everyone looked at us and went, what in the hell?

I'll never forget the day that I had the meeting, Tommy, with the, he's no longer there, but it was the building official we got assigned from Gilbert. He showed up, I can't remember his name. And he's like, oh, this is how you use your online scheduling system. I said, well, is there a way that I can just have you out here every day? And he's like, well, why?

And I go, because I'm going to need you every day. I said, I got to be done in August. He's like, oh, well, it gives you a year and two months. I said, no, you dipshit. Like 90 days from now. He's like, no freaking way. So anyway, what happened? I'll try to give the Reader's Digest version is that that put us on the map because we outshined everyone else.

Not because they were we were better general contractors or they were worse general contractors. We took the mentality of seeing the end of the beginning and reverse engineering it and doing that. So where I'm going with this is we got all of our utilities done ahead of time. I got the sod in ahead of time so that when all the monsoons hit, we were done and we were just building the building.

Well, I got it dried in so that all of our trades could work inside. Weather didn't impact us. The other five schools that were being built in the valley at the time, none of them opened on time. They had all sorts of problems because they waited. They waited, they waited, they waited, and the monsoons killed them. And it was a wet summer that summer.

So anyway, that was kind of the catalyst. And so coming out of that, I'll spare the audience the whole... We pivoted and iterated on some other things. We tried some other things. But then we soon realized that School Builder was myopic in our name. And we said, we've got to come up with a brand that has more just diversity.

And so we sat around and we did the old brainstorm where you got yellow stickers. You've done it before, whiteboarding. And we put up all these names. And one of them was Blue Wave, spelled B-L-U-E, Wave. It was based on, we had all read the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, which is a leadership business book. It's a great book. It is a great book. And we're like, hey, that's catchy.

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