How I started my Business, The Secret May Surprise You

hey what's up guys my name is Kyle and if you are new to the channel welcome there's a lot of videos you can go around take a look I do a lot of projects a lot of custom post frame buildings that's my big bread-and-butter but you'll find a lot of carpentry tips and tricks as well as a bunch of reviews and thoughts on tools that I like to use on the daily to do my job however if you already are subscribed to the channel I want to say thank you for for joining in on today's video which is gonna be a little bit different what I wanted to do today was take a couple minutes and just make a short video about the thing that I am constantly asked to talk about and that is how did you get into business as a carpenter I never planned on being a carpenter I was always going to be in computers I love technology I went to college and got my computer science degree and upon graduating I had a pretty darn good job at a local Believe It or Not construction company that had probably about seven companies all under one roof and I managed their IT department with another guy to this day I still miss a lot of those people however I love what I do now and I would not have found it had my in-laws not then what I would actually say selfish and wanted me and my wife to move back home not be in the big city so what they did was they offered to sell us one of the family farms my wife's family are big farmers and so we bought a rundown farmhouse it needed extreme renovation because it was in disarray you could barely walk across some of the floors however for the most part the bones of the house the outside skeleton was really good it was that old traditional full to buy material balloon framed built in the 1890s and it just needed a lot of work on the inside so we started down the path of remodeling it my dad gave me a lot of those tools to to do that both in the physical form and in the knowledge that he had over the years remodeling his own houses so after about two years of remodeling my own house I realized that first off it's a lot of but second off it is super gratifying to see something start and finish in front of your eyes and know that you did it with your own hands so I started to kind of in the back of my mind see that as a way out from the corporate world I didn't didn't really like knowing that my destiny was in someone else's hands I didn't really like to know that I wasn't gonna get a raise unless my boss saw fit I kind of always knew that I wanted to be my own boss and I found that through construction and remodeling that might be my Avenue now it wasn't that I was like super passionate about it it wasn't that I thought I want to do this the rest of my life it was like this is my option this is my my my way towards a goal I don't really know how it happened I just know that I started to get some local friends and family members people that went to the same church as me people found out that I was doing it that I wanted to do more of it and they started hiring me for little job I didn't know how to bid them so I was working time and material I just came up with a number I charged people by the hour and I just said hey here's the material cost here's my time and that's a really good way to do it if you're getting into the trades because you don't really understand what goes into projects until you experience that fast-forward probably three or four years I went and hired my first employee I then hired another employee and another employee and all sudden it was me and three guys and we were building new construction homes things were okay I mean it was okay I was kind of getting tired of the the whole I don't know just the whole process of dealing with homeowners dealing with subcontractors you know organizing and scheduling and all that stuff that came with the residential remodeling new construction I guess style and I was fortunate enough for my wife's grandpa to call me one day and say hey would you build me a barn I have a guy that said he would build it for me for I don't know I was like 18,000 and if you can do that why don't you just do it I'd rather pay you than someone I don't know well I didn't really know much about post frame I'd never really done it I'd done very little metalwork but I had a buddy who I went to high school with that done a lot of it in his career that's all he really knew and I brought him in for weekends and he helped me do my first post frame and it went really well it was easy in a sense that I didn't really have to deal with clean up every day and somebody's kitchen I didn't really have to deal with going in and out of somebody's house I didn't have to worry about disturbing them if they were busy like I was outside and I just got to enjoy that time on that project so much that I started thinking this is what I want to do I need to figure out how I do more post frames people noticed people saw that they reached out to me over the next year and said hey thinking about doing a job what do you think and I I just jumped in I didn't really know exactly what I was doing I learned enough off of that first job start bidding jobs not working by the hour but saying okay this is my material package cost this is how long I think it's gonna take me this is the amount of overhead I have whether that be machinery insurances and just saying hey here's my price but the beauty of being self-employed is that you make up your own rules in a sense that you don't have to work eight hours a day you can work all the overtime you want you might not get paid great by the hour but if you put it enough time you can meet schedules deadlines and put more jobs in front of you and make more money but that is kind of the vicious circle it's kind of like playing a football game where you keep getting first downs but you never score a touchdown and you can really burn out quickly so fast forward probably three years after I did my first post frame it really became clear to me that I needed to stop doing all the other stuff I needed to stop being jack-of-all-trades dabbling in post frame still doing some remodeling putting some real sod and just focus on post frame and I bought the first piece of equipment and then the next year I bought another piece of equipment and then the following year I bought another piece of equipment to where now I on all my equipment but it's taken since 2007 ish yeah it's about 2007 to get to where I'm at so the point of this video is not to brag it's to say that people are always saying it man how did you get so successful first off it took a lot of hard work I worked a ton of long hours I still work way more than I ever would if I was working for the man on a nine-to-five job but the beauty is that's my choice while I can while I want to while the work is there as long as I'm not taking away from my family time as long as I'm being present when I am there with my family but when I'm at work I'm present and I'm busting my tail I'm gonna keep doing it and I love it so if you're a young person out there and you're thinking but how do I get into it Kyle first off I would say maybe dabble maybe do some projects around the house if it's something you really like and you don't really have the motivation or maybe you just are scared to go out on your own and start your own business go find a carpenter that will hire you and I promise you there's a lot out there because it's hard to find good young people that want to work hard and you go ask questions you go and do everything that you can to learn as much as you can when you feel like it's the right time you can go out on your own and have the knowledge to at least feel good about what you're doing but don't think it's gonna come easy and don't think that it's gonna happen overnight luckily for so many of you out there we have things like Instagram Facebook tik-tok YouTube LinkedIn all of these social media platforms where you can spread whatever message it is that you want to spread about you and your brand to whoever you want to in the entire world and you can do it for nothing but your time and that's what I found through Instagram and Facebook but obviously YouTube is that I'm spreading my message I'm trying to do my best to not only inspire and motivate people to do really good on their work for clients to make sure that they're spending their money on the right stuff not just hiring the cheapest person but then also for me I'm trying to err with my potential client that next person that's looking for their project to hire me and my crew because we do a specific job we care about certain details and we're going to act a certain way and I share that every day knowing that if I put that out there it's gonna come back and it's not gonna cost me anything but my time you know I think it's a great time to be a contractor I feel like I probably just rambled a ton on this video and I don't know if I really helped but I think the most important thing is even if you don't see or feel super passionate about what you're doing I don't think that's what drove me initially it was about being passionate about doing the best I could so being passionate for what you're doing isn't the most important thing but being passionate in whatever you do is the most important thing and for me it's always been about being competitive and doing the best I can it doesn't matter if I'm tying my shoes or if I'm putting up a post frame I just want to do it better faster that makes me happy and drives me to keep doing better even if you want to be a contractor even if you want to start your own business know that it's gonna take a little bit something extra but it's totally doable and all you have to do is start by doing and that's the beauty of it most people they don't do they think they have ideas and those that act on those ideas are the ones that are successful if you want to do it go out and do it live the dream and do your best

Channel: RR Buildings

Views: 191,395

Rating: 4.9677267 out of 5

Keywords: how to, how to start with no money, how to start a business, make money, rr buildings, rural renovators, post frame, do it yourself, construction how to, how to work in construction, how to start a construction company, how I started my business, secret to success, contractors, tradesmen, trades people, business video, top tips to run a successful business

Id: KzJsUqAHVCM

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020