Sacha: Welcome to the Greatness is Designed podcast, the podcast where we argue great businesses are designed. I'm your host, Sacha Alimchandani, the Managing Director of BrassRock Consulting. BrassRock Consulting is a firm that strictly focuses on helping companies grow or handle succession and transition planning, and we do this through management consulting and CFO sers. Our hope is that you, the listener, are able to gain some insights from what we do here at BrassRock and are able to apply it within your business.

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So at BrassRock, 50% of our work is done in the realm of succession planning, and succession planning deals with selling companies to private equity firms, to employees, or to family. In today's episode, we're going to specifically talk about selling to kids. One of the things that business owners don't pay enough attention to that we believe is absolutely important is providing your kids with courage, optimism, and discipline. These are issues that are overlooked time and time again that we see within the firm. But they are absolutely vital to the success of a business when transferring from father or mother to children.

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Today, to help us talk about this, is Tyler Preer. Tyler Preer is the  President of Permacast Concrete, and he is the son of John McLeod. Permacast has been around for 25 years, and the company deals in major concrete structures. So think high-rises, think parking lots. This is a business where it's all risk, very tight margins, and you're always paying attention to safety. It's not a business for the faint-hearted at all; any small mistake can be massively detrimental. So you need a lot of courage to pull off this business. So Ty, welcome to the show.

Tyler: Yeah, thank you for having me, Sacha.

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Sacha: So Ty, how long have you been with Permacast for?

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Tyler: I've been full-time about eight years.

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Sacha: Walk us through that process. Did you just start off right as VP, or has it been a—?

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Tyler: Yeah, so prior to the full-time, I was working on the tools—carpenter kind of labor.

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Sacha: Boots on the ground.

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Tyler: That's right, boots on the ground. I broke my back in a dirt bike accident—motorcycle, a head-on collision with a vehicle—when I was doing that. And when I broke my back, I went back to school and kind of changed my outlook of what I was going to do with the firm and dove in; instead of getting into carpentry, I went into business.

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Once I dove into the business aspect side of the company, I started off doing the safety. So John McLeod about 10 years ago got a project with IOL, and we did all of the development over in the Quarry Park area—you know, it was a scope close to 10 million in concrete, probably all said and done.

Sacha: Big project.

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Tyler: Massive project, yeah. And he didn't have a safety program implemented at the time, so I worked for Gibson Energy in the past and had a bit of background with their safety program. So that's actually how I started was implementing a safety program so John could actually take part in the project with IOL and Remington. From there, I just built up kind of my own job because John never really seen that there was a need for anyone in the office other than with accounting and what he was doing for management at the time. He had no plan to even expand the office like that; he always thought it was the overhead "keep it low" was his goal.

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So as I kind of got involved, I started making my own job really and creating my own position. So it started with safety, then you know, we were renting massive amounts of material—you know, up to millions of dollars in the formwork rentals—and no tracking. So I developed some systems on how we could actually start tracking this information and making sure that what was on site was actually on site and what was going back was actually going back, which is critical.

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Yeah, my—I kind of had a ton of little positions in the company at first, and yeah, it was more of just a "make a resume" kind of thing. I wasn't looking to take over the business. And you just sort of built it over time and so it's basically been eight years in the making, so to speak. Yes, yes, and I definitely was not a  President. No, John barely even wanted to give me a position; he didn't even see safety as a full thing. Part-time is what I was.

Sacha: So at what point did you feel that a transition was happening? Was there a TSN turning point, or—?

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Tyler: Yeah, I think—I think to be honest, it took time. I mean, it took courage, really, for me to even see it. Because at first, John isn't one to pat your back. So as we talked about courage, I think it can be given to you in multiple ways: if you're just, you know, "good job" on everything you do and you never have any liability or you're not liable for anything, it's easy to think you have courage when you really don't, right? And what John did is he always threw me into things and was like, "You have to figure it out."

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Sacha: And he wouldn't help you.

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Tyler: He wouldn't help me, no. Like if it was—he wouldn't throw me into a big meeting and make myself look stupid, but what he would do is he'd give me this task and say, "This is the problem, come up with a solution." And he wouldn't really help me through it. I'd do it, I'd give it to him, and he'd tell me kind of what aspects were wrong and why.

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Sacha: The number one thing that we always see in these family-based businesses is a lot of times because it's a parent's child, they pseudo want to coddle them and not put them in uncomfortable situations, which I can understand that from a maternal point of view. But there's family decisions and then there's business decisions, and that child has to become a business owner at some point, and so you have to give them these protected experiences so that they can build up the courage to be able to actually pull it off. This is why transitioning a business is different than for employees, because with employees you are giving them the experience, but with family, we just see it time and time again that they just haven't given them enough of a leash to have experiences.

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Tyler: I think you're bang on. I think a lot of parents too that I've seen in some of the competition is they so badly want their son to be in that place, and sometimes they back them up in ways that they shouldn't. You know, made mistakes, and instead of trying to say, "You know, this is what you could do to fix" or "This was the issue" and outlining it, you know, they put it onto someone else and they kind of hide it, and John never did that.

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One of the biggest things is what gave me courage is at first he didn't just say "it's going to you, Tyler." He let me develop my position, he let me develop my confidence with my position, and then he let me start to work with our team and learn how to become independent. That's correct.

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And you know, I think courage is a big one because for me, when I started pricing jobs, this was really hard, because you look at reservoirs and parkades and these aspects, right? In these builds, these big, big, complicated builds—you don't know how you put it together. It's concrete, right? I mean, you know, a lot of individuals, they don't understand, at least coming from myself; it's very, very intimidating. So I think for me at first it was not opening my mouth before I knew things, and John taught me that: "You know, you don't talk until you're very confident with what you've learned or retained, and in turn he taught me that I could become courageous and I could get courage for certain scopes and aspects and stuff like that, then I can open my mouth."

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Sacha: You're 100% right. And I imagine, especially when you first came in, because these people, you know, had been in the firm for 20 years and then you come in and give your recommendations or insight—I mean, it's a blue-collar company with really, really tough guys who are very opinionated. You can only envision them challenging you, especially in the beginning, because you're the new kid on the block and everyone else has been there for 15 years.

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Tyler: And I think, you know, that was where John's unorthodox kind of leadership skills were such a positive for my success.

 

Sacha: Let's talk about optimism. We say that optimism is critical when it comes to growing a business, because what we know for certain is we can't tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. But if you get up every day with an optimistic attitude, you can confront any challenge that's presented. And now I can't tell you whether you're going to succeed or not; the reality is what I can tell you for certain is if you tackle tomorrow's problem with a pessimistic attitude, I can guarantee you failure. But if you're doing it with an optimistic attitude, you have a higher probability of success. So what do you think?

 

Tyler: I understand what you're saying. I think a lot of individuals may disagree, but I find that optimism is 100% the reason why I am who I am today in every aspect of my life. Especially in business, I lived this life that I thought I was optimistic—that I was going to be, you know, five years I was going to own the business, I was going to be living in the states, and I was going to be pricing from, you know, and this, that, and the other thing, and then I learned, oh, there's all these fires that happen. And there's all these problems that come, and you know what? If you don't have the policies and whatnot and the right people in place, you're not going to be able to deal with them abroad; it is what it is, right?

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So what I've learned was that, you know, you're a product of your surrounding. So optimism starts at the top and it goes down the hill, I find, into our teams. You have to always be driving for success and the image of where we want to be and where we're going to be. And I find it's especially in your leaders, right? So we have our foremen who will run the jobs; they need to be optimistic because we have a million things that could go wrong: weather, for one. There's a hundreds of external problems—delays in with other trades that we have no control over. It's very easy to be pessimistic and come in every day and go, "Ah, this happened and this happened," but you have to see the positive side in the clear goal in order to properly teach your crew and lead a crew into success, right? A team into success. Because if you never see the positivity in things, it's going to be a very negative run; you can do it, but I just don't think you're going to do it to the same extent.

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When I broke my back, it was the same thing. First thing I thought in my head was "why me?" This is why, you know, and you feel like a victim. It's the same as in business; a lot of the issues that come to me, they're not black and white, they're usually—rarely are, and the thing is you can get discouraged very, very quick. But you have to remember what your ultimate goal was: why are you doing this in the first place? I think if you don't have that "why" factor and you're not able to be optimistic, I just don't think you'll ever get to a level of success that I am personally after. And it's, like I said, it's easy to relate it back to the accident because it's easy to wake up every day and go, "Oh, my nerve's not working, why me?" Right? "This isn't fair, this isn't what I signed up for." But if you're not looking at what the positive from it, what can come out of it, if you're not looking and seeing a positive finish line, what are you shooting for?

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Sacha: So at the firm, so every month, you know, we're meeting with our clients on strategy and on financial forecasting, and throughout the month we're always inundated with challenges and projects and all this sort of jazz. But the reason why we always go back to the strategy and the forecasts is because what we believe is that's what keeps people optimistic; it keeps us back on the path, regardless of whatever issue happens. We always come back to that and we say, "Okay, what are we trying to achieve?" If we want to continue to grow this firm, let's just stick back to the strategy, regardless if something bad happens. But to your point, it's very easy for people to fall victim or cry wolf.

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Tyler: Right, and I think you're bang on. I'll give you an example, Sacha, where I think you're bang on: over the last two to three years, we've had an economic downturn, right? And our company, we were able to grow the company's gross margins, right? And I think that's where optimism is key, because you need to be able to sit down with your team and say, "Look, this is where we are, and this is where we need to be. What steps do we have to do to get here?" Right? "I understand that the economy is not where we want it to be, but we can't give up. We need to situate, we need to rotate, we need to find other ways to improve." And the only way, in my opinion, is optimism.

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Sacha: Let's talk about discipline. So what we argue is that all success takes discipline, from stuff as simple as waking up and getting to the office every day because they don't want to deal with their labor that doesn't accept them, they don't want to deal with the customers who are giving them a hard time or the suppliers who won't give them the same deals that they got their dad. So from stuff as simple as not getting out of bed every day on time to having the discipline to believe in their processes, what do you think?

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Tyler: I understand what you're saying. I think in my opinion, discipline's almost like the obvious one for me, but courage and optimism is what drives my discipline, if that makes sense. So it's like the other two are more what feed the discipline, even though that's kind of the most direct thing in my head that I would go to, right? To say "what will bring success? Discipline." I always say that, it doesn't matter what it is because if you devote yourself and you become loyal to a task, you will succeed, right? That's how I always thought.

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But now you push someone who's courageous in what they're doing and optimistic and they're disciplined—boom, you have all three, and to me, that's what gets me out of bed. I'll give you an example: I made a mistake on a bid, probably underbid by about a quarter million dollars, which is quite a big mistake. And you know, your courage just goes down, your optimism goes down, right? And if it wasn't for my dedication, right, if it wasn't for my discipline, I wouldn't move on; I wouldn't get up out of bed. Instead of—yeah, you get stuck in those little ruts, and I think that's where they all are so integrative.

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Sacha: Even in times where you're deflated because something bad has happened, as long as you have a discipline process to pull yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back at it—that's what it comes down to: discipline.

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Tyler: And that's the hardest. When you continue to fail, you know, you're doing things, you're getting the jobs, but the money's not coming in, the guys are getting upset because there's no bonuses, and everyone is relying on you or me in this case, and Tyler, "why is this happening?" You know, and there's a lot of external forces that I couldn't control, like weather, for example, is the most obvious in construction.

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Exactly. So what I did is I stayed disciplined, I stayed optimistic and courageous, and I continued to strive for my success, my task, what I seen as the vision. When you don't feel like getting up, it's no different than working out or sports; you get these weeks or months of so much growth. That's the key is that every day when you wake up, you have your goals in line, you have your vision of what you want to do and how you want to succeed, and do it for yourself. Be disciplined for yourself, because in business there's so many days you don't want to get up.

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Sacha: Every day you're thrown with unknown issues, at the same time unknown opportunities. You have to have a disciplined approach to how you're going to handle these things, because you need that consistency.

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Tyler: And growth, right? Not to interrupt you, but if you don't want to grow, then it's totally fine to never feel uncomfortable. But like you say, these issues, these fires per se, that come up and that you got to deal with and they're not planned. That's what makes you a good leader: having that optimistic thought and the courage to actually see it through. It's easy to say that discipline and optimism and courage don't have anything to do with success, but try to find one individual who's very successful that didn't have it. Now you look at the people who get to a certain point that could be successful but they hit a wall; a lot of times they're missing one of these aspects, in my opinion.

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Sacha: So Ty, I got to tell you man, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. We're in agreement that you need courage, optimism, and discipline to grow these firms. Thank you for sharing your insights; we wish you the greatest success.

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Tyler: Thanks Sacha, I appreciate you having me on.

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Sacha: That was Tyler Preer of Permacast Concrete explaining why courage, optimism, and discipline are critical when you're transitioning a business from parents to children. My name is Sacha Alimchandani. Thank you for listening to Greatness is Designed. If you want to listen to other episodes, go to brassrockconsulting.com/podcast or wherever you source your podcasts.