Mike Barnhart
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Mike Barnhart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As leaders, we are dealers of hope. And there's this phrase, without hope, the people will perish. And so we have to be providing hope for everybody that's part of our team. And literally, I don't think a week goes by that I don't think about that, is that we as leaders are dealers of hope so that our people don't perish.
What's up? I got to fix one of those numbers. We did $73 million last year. We're going for $91 million this year.
91.
I mean, 15% is a good one. If you can get to 17 or 18, you're doing even better.
Under 10.
Our strategy has always been in green fielding. But still, our Cincinnati location, we still lose money in it today. And we're a year and a half in. But our advertising spend is 35% of revenue right now. So you're doing that because when you look at the success story of it, like our Dayton location, we opened up in 2021. This year, we're doing $20 million in Dayton.
And it's super cash flow positive. It's actually the highest margin in location business right now in our business. So it is a little bit different as you're scaling and how that changes.
It is slower, for sure. And you talked to Tom Howard. I remember I asked Tom one time, I was like, tell me about a tuck-in that didn't go well. And he's like, they've all gone well. So maybe some people are better than others. But with greenfielding, it's kind of crazy. Because yes, it does take three to four years to really adopt in the market. But once you've hit that kind of threshold,
It's like you've always been there. It's like you've been there for 20 years, even though once people do pick up your name. And really, I mean, anything that we've ever – I don't know if you've seen this, but any time I've ever made a change or we used to just be plumbing only and we added excavation and we added HVAC, we added electrical, we added other locations.
You have these changing points within your business. And from the minute you make them and you start to enact them, they all seem to take like 36 months to get some traction. Maybe you can make it a little faster than that with as many, as good as you are, but it always has taken me three years to really build something.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, to look at it throughout the years, I've been doing it for 11 years now. We've gone from 1.9 million to, you know, 91 million this year. It's been a really rewarding journey, for sure. You know, you do have those kind of pressure points along the way where you do hit these parts of scalability that feel really rough, and then you kind of push through them.
And a lot of that really comes down to the infrastructure that you build within your company. You have good people. You've got the right meeting cadences. You've got the communication rhythms. And for me, it's... You know, I've never stopped being really curious about the business.
You know, for any CFO out there, one of the things that I do every Sunday and I've been doing it for 11 years now, I send out an email to the whole management side and leadership side of the company of here's what I think about last week. And, you know, I go through about 20 different reports that, you know, I've got kind of flagged on my side.
And I look at them and I look at them every Sunday and I start to see trends. You start to understand that business and then you become a really good storyteller. And, you know, you're not going to do that if you're not curious. But once you get able to tell that story, like this year I was actually I went to the management team and I was like, hey, I think I'm going to stop doing this email.
I'm still going to do it for myself. And they were like, no, you have to keep doing this email because it's It really does highlight out what is happening within the business, where we have areas for opportunity, where are there anomalies in the business.
And then you can, you know, I'm not the one that's most of the time fixing them these days, but I'm helping people understand what's happening so they can address it.
Yeah, I mean, at the basic level, it's like you don't have to – the nice thing about ChatGPT is how easy it is to use. I just load our PDF financial statements in each month. And then I'll ask it questions about it. And I'm pretty good at understanding the business. But it will pull things up that I didn't actually see within the business. Because you can ask really specific questions.
Like I could put January of 24 and January of 25. But it has every month in between. I say, compare this against the last quarter and compare it against January of 25.
by location and i want to specifically look at the sewer department and it'll give you like a really you know detailed answer on on what's going on with that and you know you're i don't know why every cfo doesn't do this because it's the time it takes to do it is under a minute and you know i was doing all the chat gbt yesterday how do you you know i got the app
Yeah, and that's the really intuitive thing about ChatGPT. I do use the desktop version more than the app, but you just load it right in there. It doesn't have to be in any sort of format. It knows how to go read it and pick up the correct information. And you can ask extremely detailed questions if you want to get in on it.
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