19 Year-Old Starts a $125K/Year Construction Business

today we'll be featuring avani a 19 year old college dropout who started his own six-figure construction company avani petras is his name and today he'll share with you how he went from being a full-time student to a full-time contractor making over a hundred thousand dollars a year profit margins and excavation are very high we love to hear numbers so what was your revenue last year the number one thing that i did and this is also my key to success what can you tell them about the estimating process how important it is right because if you get it wrong you're not gonna make anything so the three keys that i have used what do you specifically need to do to take on bigger jobs to to do more volume so why don't we start with you sharing about why you started the company when and anything else you want to add to that well i was working in construction for about six years before i started and i started as a foundation laborer from that i branched off into my own thing and i started my own construction company because i wanted the freedom and i wanted the ability to grow you just wanted to be your own boss yeah right and then what about your nursing career how long did that last well it lasted about two years because that was originally my dream because i grew up in a family that was in the in the medical field one day i just woke up and i realized that it was not for me and then i just i just grabbed the wool by its horns and and went into the construction field i love it man you're doing what you love and it's playing with big toys okay what was your budget to get going to buy stuff and so forth my budget to get going was twenty thousand dollars and i did not start out with this trailer but i started out with this truck so from that twenty thousand dollars i bought the ten thousand dollar truck okay i bought a six thousand dollar trailer and with the rest of that money i plan in my head to finance that and put that towards financing the excavator total it's going to come out to be 79 so about 80 000 that's on a four-year financing plan zero percent down zero percent interest and it's about sixteen hundred a month for for this gotcha and every month i would make that money back and some so every month i would make the the payment for the excavator and some more for the next month so i kept on building up like that and once i saw that i had uh consistent income and consistent jobs i decided to sell the other excavator the old one and i got something a little bit bigger and something that i can do a lot more with quicker too okay let's talk about buying the right equipment where do you buy yours to get the best price quality any tips advice on that the biggest tip i could give is buying new especially in this market right now because if you buy new there's a lot higher resale value that rather than buying something used that you don't know how how good it was taken care of right so definitely buy new from a from a well-known dealership so you know you're not getting scammed okay um what about like smaller pieces of equipment where would you go what would be your preference personally i go to fi naughty and i know they're mainly on the on the west coast but yeah new is the way to go [Music] talk to us about your process of estimating depending on the size of the project i like to break the project down in phases if i don't know the exact cost of the labor for that portion i try to calculate how long it might take me to to do the project and i calculate and i present that to them on an hourly bid i like to take measurements of everything and i like to take even i like to drive around the neighborhood to see how long it would or how hard or how difficult it would be to get the equipment on site i take that into consideration when i bid as well okay what's your hourly rate does that vary from doing this to doing something else or it varies on the size of the equipment for this i usually charge between 150 and 200 an hour and that's if that's per for one person operating the machine but if i have another guy on site that can that can vary as well depending on what we're doing that day okay what can you tell as far as a piece of advice to new construction owners who are getting into this industry um what can you tell them about the estimating process and how important it is right because if you get it wrong you're not gonna make anything well i definitely one thing that helped for me was uh in order to establish yourself in the beginning what you want to do and this is this is the key in the beginning in order to establish yourself you got to keep the prices as low as possible you got to make sure to make something but you got to keep the prices as low as possible so if you think something's gonna take you two hours to do and you normally would charge two hundred dollars an hour maybe try to keep it on the lower end maybe even a hundred dollars an hour because the most important thing in the beginning is getting the job because after that you can get word of mouth in in that connection can grow interesting are you guys looking for ways to improve your memory and focus do you want to conquer every day while improving yourself one step at a time entrepreneurship needs human optimization because you are the one making all these important decisions so you need more mental memory than everybody else around you our sponsor today is on it and they are ready to help you on your self-improvement journey they've sold over a million bottles of their world-renowned nootropic alpha brain the nootropic is filled with clinically studied ingredients that help you with your focus and your memory and they are so confident you're going to love it that it comes with a no questions asked money back guarantee try alpha brain today by using this link on it.com forward slash up flip and get up to 30 off your bottle of alpha brain again that is dot onnit.com forward slash up flip and enjoy we love to hear numbers so what was your revenue last year gross and what are you doing on average monthly year-to-date obviously almost the end of the year uh on average well i the first half of the year i was in the smaller excavator so on average with that i would say i was doing about six seven thousand depending on the month depending on the job but i was between six and sixteen thousand okay and once i got this i've been more in the ten to ten to thirty thousand about okay what did you do last year total last year total about ninety thousand ninety grand okay but i started in april so nice so it wasn't a full year so where are you at this year once it completes this year i'm at about a hundred i have to check to make sure but i'm about 110 somewhere around there congrats what's your what's your next goal my next goal number wise is 200 200 pounds for the next double it okay but the year's not over either i have a couple big jobs coming up this year too so good well on that note um what do you think with just what you've learned how do you scale and increase your revenue as a general contractor uh reinvesting in the company 100 reinvesting right now what i would what i would reinvest into is buying another excavator wow and a truck i i plan on hopefully buying another truck um next year and maybe we'll see where it goes but potentially another excavator if i can hire an operator let's talk about mistakes that you've made when you first started the construction business can you think of anything uh i would say the biggest mistake that i made was being too broad and that was good from the aspect of getting jobs but once people started asking me hey what do you do i kind of had too many answers and that was not good so once i cut down and once i became more specific i was able to get further in that specific field yeah what would you differently now what would be your advice to people getting in i would try to stick with something and be consistent to that one specific thing because if one week a tile installer and the next way you're a landscaper then nobody's going to know when to call you gotcha in terms of background experience if i want to get into construction i don't have an experience like what would you say to that like you worth a little bit but i don't have excretion experience but i want to become a contractor how does all that come together one thing that would definitely help is getting into a trade maybe working for another company to kind of get familiar with the whole process of doing things and then once you get familiar enough then you can branch off and be your own boss is that similar to what you did yeah well i worked for a foundation company for about four years before i started excavation and that that was kind of in the same general field i learned how to read blueprints over there and i learned a lot of vital things from there okay so it's not really viable for somebody to be completely clueless to get into it and really maybe be successful they first have to you got to learn a few things before definitely yeah [Music] avani let's talk about the services you offer like which are least profitable which are most profitable and what do you what do you spend your time doing most would you say i would say now i'm trying to get more into the new construction uh industry and there's so much that goes around uh building a new house for excavators specifically and that that's that that's what makes it the most profitable for me so what services do you offer i mean i guess it's pretty much anything in terms of construction and yeah pretty much pretty much anything in terms of uh excavation that includes plumbing uh electrical trenching for plumbing trenching for electrical uh sewer sewer installations we do right-of-way tops we do gas lines also grading gravel driveways we kind of do a little bit of everything are there certain jobs that are highest profitability versus certain that are not or is it pretty much the same across everything you do uh definitely the highest profit would be um new construction because there's a like i said there is a there's a lot more variables so for a house we go and typically we bid the foundation excavation we bid the uh rain drains backfill driveway uh grading erosion control and there's a lot more things that add up rather than just going and doing a gravel driveway or something like that so when you say new construction you mean those things like you're not actually building a house you're not framing it you're not involved on that level right just just on the foundation prep and then after the foundation uh backfilling the perimeter yeah what's your monthly overhead right now for your business and what's the most expensive thing to keep going uh the most expensive thing for me right now would definitely be the excavator and that's about sixteen hundred dollars but on top of that another reoccurring payment that i have to make is insurance for the excavator insurance for the trailer and insurance for the truck if you add all your expenses just to keep operating right before you make a profit what would it come to it's about two thousand dollars that's it two grand two thousand so if you make four grand that month you're in profit two thousand yeah wow i thought you'd say like 10 grand no expenses but you're keeping it pretty lean yeah okay we've got a ton of lean videos with paul acres you guys and this is for you and this is for you guys as well check them out you'll learn how to be lean and make higher profit margins tell us what you see as providing good customer experience like what makes people come back to you what makes people talk about you with their friends um have you and then have you had a negative experience where the customer was not happy and how did you deal with that as a professional so the three keys that i i have used was one communication that's the biggest thing in this field because the homeowner is not seeing what you're doing constantly so if they don't know and if there's a miscommunication then that can cause problems so number one communication number two integrity if you tell them that you're going to do something for that price try to do it for that price even if something happens just try to keep keep to your word and number three keeping clean that's another big thing especially in construction if you leave a mess on the job site they're not going to call you back i've only had a problem with one customer an opportunity to learn right an opportunity to learn and what i what what i ended up doing was i gave them a big discount from the original price and i went and completed the work exactly like what they wanted and they ended up being happier uh much happier than any of my other customers because i came in i was i was true to my word [Music] where the profit margins approximately profit margins and excavation are very high yeah typically if i was to do a foundation and i was to charge ten thousand dollars for the whole thing and if it was a smaller drop my expenses would be hauling off dirt uh pipes and gravel so that would come out typically it would come out to be like about two to three thousand dollars okay and the highest reoccurring expense though would be definitely the excavator buying the truck buying the trailer and the fuel that you're using and the fuel yeah okay so your proper margins are like well above 50 percent yeah i would say so okay let's talk about the employees that you have how many today how much do you pay them any tips tricks on that that you can share with us i don't have any employees but i do have a partner which i partnered up with my cousin and he's been a big help throughout the whole process of the company definitely having somebody close with you and somebody that you trust is a huge huge benefit when you start a company so that helped a lot okay do you plan to hire at some point uh yeah i i currently am looking to hire a machine operator okay and labor uh so yeah if you guys know of anybody let me know we'll pass along why do you want to hire a machine operator though what what's what's that going to free you up to do when i'm on site i'm mainly in the uh machine okay so if i can get somebody to operate the machine i would have a lot more time to focus on marketing and figure out different ways to market i would also be able to focus more on communicating with clients writing invoices following up with paperwork figuring out like all my insurance is because i i have a lot of i even right now i'm remembering everything that i need to do and there's a lot so you'd rather do that than being an excavator well it it's it's that's the way that the company would grow the most so yeah guys here when you first opened petra's homes what form of advertising did you use to get new customers the number one thing that i did and this is also my key to success personally was i started working for family and friends and people that i knew and i trusted and once i got work with them that slowly turned into self-marketing that slowly turned into word of mouth and that was what really really helped me out so most of your customers today is word of mouth yeah what you're saying wow okay definitely what are you spending on marketing uh today if anything and what's been the best return for you uh one thing that actually helped me out was i i started making a bunch of t-shirts originally for for the employees and i uh and then i started making more t-shirts that i was handing out to people and and when they were putting those t-shirts on people would read my company name people would read my phone number and and i got a few calls from that as well so that was helpful nice but today do you spend like on yeah like a thousand dollar budget on facebook or instagram or you don't spend anything on i don't i don't usually i focus mainly on word of mouth well okay let's talk about any potential education or training you need to get into the excavation construction business i would recommend getting uh your osha certification at least osha 10 but i know there's an osha 30 and i know you can get different certificates for excavation as well like a general uh operation operating engineer license as well okay how do you do by any chance we call what that may cost and how long it could take uh i know osha 10 takes 10 hours and i i i can't remember specifically the cost but i think it was about 200 okay so not like in the thousands no okay and why is that important to have uh what you can show that to your clients and it gives the it makes them feel more comfortable with you on site any other you think education or tips or tricks that are important just to start off successfully that come to mind definitely do your your homework on it and i what i did was i watched a lot of youtube okay and i watched operators i kind of saw what they did and i kind of tried to copy that and you just got to kind of do your research before you get into it but definitely youtube is your your best friend for that okay yeah it's not it's not an industry where you just open up a book read it and then all of a sudden you you know everything uh not really okay this business can be seasonal right like in the winter it's rainy it's mucky what do you do in terms of just shifting your business to continue to grow in these slow seasons typically in the slower seasons i try to network market i try to get my name in people's mouths to just have people thinking about me whether it's posting something whether it's calling to see if i can get some more jobs whether it's just taking pictures or cleaning my equipment i just try to get to work with something in some way towards towards growing the business okay can you share maybe a couple specific tasks or stuff the systems that you use to sort of kick it into gear during slow season well i use instagram okay typically that's primarily what i use for social media and another trick that i found helpful in the slow seasons was to use craigslist and post jobs over there because i got i when i first started that's kind of what fueled the company was craigslist [Music] when you started not long ago um was there certain what things did you struggle with i guess and did you have a moment when you're like i'm just gonna give up uh one thing that i struggled with because i'm a i'm an introvert and i'm very anti-social you're doing this so yeah this is well one thing that i definitely struggled with was uh talking to people at first and going and giving bids taking phone calls i kind of would get nervous especially since i i was always and i still am a lot younger than the rest of the people in this field and since it's such a competitive uh field for somebody like me it was kind of harder to to gain that trust but once i gained that trust from friends and from family once they were able to tell people about me that's kind of what skyrocketed us so definitely the hardest thing was talking to people but once i put that aside once i put my uh fear aside and once i started talking to people that's really what helped us out the most what was that moment though like what does it mean to put fear aside you can't just switch a flip or flip a switch so that you just said you know what i'm done with this or what helped you overcome that well i lost one job because one guy was there and he was a lot easier to talk to than i was for that one specific job and since i lacked in communication that's kind of what gave that job to that guy okay so once i prioritize the communication with the uh whatever contractors are on site and with the homeowner and with the client once i prioritize that communication that's really what helped out we'd love to hear your comments about your struggles when you got into the business like kavani just shared his story you guys we love reading your comments we love responding to them so please comment below one sentence what did you overcome what was your struggle we appreciate that [Music] what's your company's brand identity i know it's super cold here and we're freezing but you did show us that little brand so this is my brain identity and actually my fiance designed this because we live in the pacific northwest so we have mountains so this is a mountain it's also a bridge because we're considered bridge city in portland and it's also wave because we have the pacific uh ocean nice and how has this sort of helped the business because i know you don't have to show this now but he's got the business name on the back of the shirt so i guess if you can yeah i can show it really quick what this helped out with was if i was wearing this people were able to read what i do and okay and i actually got a couple phone calls uh while i was wearing it and while my friends were wearing it as well so it was a good little uh easy way to market the company okay um anything else you could share in terms of the importance of having a brand identity as a construction person yes it's very vital to your company because people want to know either your name and what you do and the easiest way to remember that is if they remember a symbol or a words that kind of put two and two together so for me it was my last name petrus homes because i i develop homes and excavation so it kind of goes together because you remember one thing which leads to the next thing and that's that's what i market everything with on my social media platforms on my t-shirts and also stickers for my equipment [Music] let's do blitz you guys blitz questions thank you for the fans that submitted questions we'll read them here as well what's your favorite business book i don't really read okay what's the one fact that changed your perspective on life forever if you're not doing something that you love then you're never gonna get anywhere you're never gonna be happy in life so you either gotta do something you love or learn to love what you do okay well well said what was the final thing that pushed you to start working on this business people not believing in me as much as i believed in myself and i kind of wanted to prove myself in a sense nice okay what's the one thing you cannot start your day without except coffee prayer prayer awesome now at the stage of success what advice would you give to your younger self be consistent uh try to be to your word and stay to your word no matter what and also be disciplined okay couple fam fan questions from adrian walker uh was asking what were your biggest hurdles when you first started uh not getting jobs at first and not being able to market because i started at the beginning of covid so there was a bunch of stuff going on then and that was the biggest hurdle and the only the only thing that helped me out was that is with that was consistent marketing okay uh antonio is asking did you do side jobs or did you just take the plunge i did side jobs at first yeah anything that would come okay to me yeah anything that would connect me with a potential client okay awesome and then quinn asked what was your fear before and after you started your own construction business my fear before was uh the market and my fear now is still the market but um what do you mean by that specifically the market because i there's so many things changing right now and even with the whole uh our currency the value of that is going up and there's just so so much room to grow but also so much risk in this market okay thank you thanks guys for submitting your questions any challenges that you face as a business owner uh i used to stress out a lot more until i started writing everything down and that way whatever was in my mind keeping me up at night i would just write it down on a piece of paper and i would have it in the morning and i could get it done in the morning rather than staying up because you you don't get that much done at night like that do you think that a lot of the contractors make that mistake oh yeah that's why they don't sleep at night oh yeah but that's that's another reason why keeping keeping good communication helps out with that as well okay that's awesome talk to us about your average work week how many hours a day do you work and uh you break the day down for us people just love to understand your world a little bit well typically my day starts anywhere from seven to eight o'clock and in the morning i usually grease the machine and if i need to take it to a job i i load it up on the trailer make sure it's all clean and ready for the day and then i try to get on site by like 9 00 a.m ish and typically i work from nine to five okay and i i definitely take take as many breaks as i need to do in order to keep my mind healthy and to keep myself full of energy so are you always on site or is there certain business things that you sort of allocate and give over to employees uh depending on the job i i sometimes i'm on site usually i'm on site but sometimes i also go and do bids in the workday but i usually keep saturdays and sundays available for any invoices that i need to write bids i need to write any jobs that i need to go see or stuff like that [Music] how are you planning to continue to grow if that's your goal like what do you specifically need to do to take on bigger jobs to to do more volume let's talk about that well my goal for the next couple of years is to grow a strong team on the field for me to be able to have the freedom to go and get more jobs go bid more jobs and just focus on marketing majorly okay which which marketing platforms do are you gonna focus on and actually start spending money on do you think going meeting up with people that i know whether it's just for coffee or whether it's on-site uh connecting with contractors connecting with architects that i know and just kind of just trying to pull in and get every single job that comes my way because at the moment we are limited to the amount of people that we have on site so once i can grow that team i definitely can can take in more jobs so you're not going to be investing in like facebook advertising instagram sounds like you're you know all about in-person relationship building kind of an opportunity and it is marketing but that's unique it's really cool yeah for construction and especially again in this industry with excavation and and with construction in general i would actually say it's majorly uh word of mouth based because people want to know that you're like because in construction people would rather have somebody that's good somebody that's easy to work with rather than somebody that has the best quality but they're really hard to work with gotcha [Music] you guys here's the tip trick that i that i mentioned earlier in the video uh why don't you tell us what you did that then helps your business grow taking saturdays off that's it saturdays and sundays off and i learned this from my gym buddies actually because they were working hard and working out in the gym every single day and once they skipped like tuesdays and thursdays once they took off on a couple days their bodies were able to heal and they were able to come back to the gym with a lot more energy and that's that's what i did for not only my physical health but also my mental health and that gave me that improved my attitude because if you don't have an attitude a positive attitude on the site then nobody there is gonna have a positive attitude because whatever you radiate you're gonna see on your employees and you're gonna see on the overall quality of the job so definitely take take breaks on saturdays and sundays and whatever else days you can so that's the success tip is basically working a lot is not a good thing find the work-life balance yeah don't burn out definitely okay those burning out you guys i'd love to hear your comments about what your life is like right now and if you implement what we're talking about here come back and comment let us know how it's changed we'd love to hear from you just in conclusion um you know what can you tell our audience our young audience all kinds of ages doesn't matter what your advice is with what you've learned so far stay disciplined and be consistent to whatever you do because if you do something for one day maybe you're not going to grow at it maybe you're not going to be the best at it but if you do it for 100 days and you look back you're gonna get way way farther than when you started okay so be consistent stay devoted to something and stay disciplined as well okay awesome melanie thank you so much it's been a pleasure yeah all right you guys that's a wrap with avani the owner of petrie's homes i hope you guys really enjoyed it young guy started out not long ago but he's on track for major success thank you for watching hit that like button subscribe to our channel and hit the bell so that you don't miss any of our amazing content we appreciate you a lot thank you

Channel: UpFlip

Views: 1,085,403

Keywords: construction, construction business, how to start construction business, best construction business ideas, construction business plan, starting a construction business, how to start your own construction business, starting construction business, how to start a construction company, contractor, construction business tips, building construction, starting a construction company, house construction, general contractor, construction company, start a construction company, upflip

Id: _PpDwut_2Lw

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021