Blueprints for Success: Ralpheal Locklear's Entrepreneurial Wisdom (Part 1)

Ralpheal Locklear, the owner of South Eastern General Contractors, shares his journey from humble beginnings to leading a thriving construction firm, revealing key entrepreneurial lessons on resilience and integrity. 📚 Level Up Your Money (New Release) 👉 Get Your Copy! 🎟️ Equip Expo 2025 👉 Save 50% off Equip Expo Ticket w/ Promo Code PAUL: Register Here 📲 Connect with Paul - Visit Official Website 🎟️ LCR Summit Louisville - Click Here 🛠️ Paul's Recommended Tools & Professionals 💻 Horizon360 – All-in-one contractor business software: gethorizon360.com 📞 CallRail – Track where your leads are coming from: callrail.com 📚 The Landscaping Bookkeeper – Know your numbers, stress less: thelandscapingbookkeeper.com 📈 Lawn Care Launch: Click Here (new program for business owners) 🌐 Footbridge Media – Get a pro lawn care website: footbridgemedia.com 🎬 VIP On-Demand: Lawn Care Life Conference 🎥 Watch All Replays Now — Includes Brandon Gray, Andy Mulder, Jason Creel, Paul Jamison & more. Learn pricing, profit, burnout prevention, and how to scale smart. 📦 Business-Building Resources by Paul Price Increase Letter Template Contract Templates Know Your Numbers 📚 Paul's Most Popular Business Books How to Build a Thriving Lawn Care Business: Buy on Amazon Cut That Grass and Make That Cash: Buy on Amazon Level Up Your Money (New Release): Buy Now 🌿 Paul's Online Banking Recommendation Relay's Online Banking: Open an Account

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to the Green Industry Podcast, your go-to guide for building a more profitable and thriving lawn care and landscaping business. Your host, Paul Jameson, is the author of five bestselling books, including Cut That Grass and Make That Cash and his latest, Level Up Your Money, all available on Amazon and Audible. Now get ready for more expert insights and practical strategies to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jamison.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Today we are in for a treat. I'm going to be interviewing the CEO of a construction company in good old Fayetteville, North Carolina. Y'all know Mont Harrison's stopping grounds there. And Ralphie L. Locklear is our special guest today. He has been in the construction industry for about 25 years, for a very long time. And he builds some immaculate custom homes. Stunning. I'm looking at some of the images right now, just beautiful, beautiful, million dollar, multimillion dollar custom homes. And so we're going to pick his brain about how he got started making these epic custom homes and what he's learned about entrepreneurship, about people, about cash flow in these jobs, getting new customers, all of that.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I'm really excited to pick his brain today. So without further ado, here's my interview with Ralph.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  I was gonna start off, you started your company back in 2004?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we started back in 2004.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll ask you about the origin story and then my audience is landscaping contractors and lawn care business owners. So I think you could add a lot of value of talking about what best marketing strategies you're using in construction. And then our biggest issue is labors and actually keeping people motivated to do the work. So any insights you could share on how you get labors to do a good job and keep showing back up would be very helpful to our audience. And then we can just organically go from there and just share what you've learned over 20 years as a entrepreneur with our audience.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll start out at first kind of telling you the origin story, you know, 44 years of age now. When I first got started with the company, like a lot of us, I think that we start out with a lot of goals and ambitions and hunger. Mine was when I got the news that my daughter was being born and hold on a second, Brandon.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Hey, Brandon.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  All right, cool. Yeah, the screen went away.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I did that. I did that on my end. So my video editor is gonna take clips of what you share and turn it into Instagram reels and Facebook reels and stuff like that. So I'm just making the screen bigger so it looks good for them, but I'm still here.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, so when I got started in the business, it was mainly because of knowing I was going to become a father. Getting married, didn't want to just have a normal job. I was already at top pay within the chosen field I went into, which was an industrial electrician, got an associate's degree.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Got a job at the place that I wanted to get a job at was within top pay within six months and realized I was at a ceiling. And there was this one day when this old guy, we called him Pops, he was about 80 or 90 years old. And he had a full back brace, plastic hard shell, you know, he would knock on it, had straps all the way around it. And would literally walk dragging his feet, you know, into the manufacturing plant. And he looked at me one day and he asked me, why was I there? And I didn't have an answer. Well, I'm here to work. He said, yeah, but you've got your whole life ahead of you. You know, you're already leading the second shift. You've only been here six months and I'm pretty sure you're at top pay. There is no more room

• 4:35Speaker 02

  for growth here. And I asked him in return, I'm like, well, I mean, you've been here how many years? And he told me a ridiculous amount of years. I think like 50 years or something like that. And I said, well, why are you still here? He said, I have no other choices. I have no other options. You know, this is all I know. And he said, the thing that stuck with me was, he said, I feel like if I, if I do quit and I leave from here, I'm going to die. And that kind of hit me and I'm like, wow, you know, that stuck with me for a little while. And I knew I was becoming a father, was getting, getting married and my brother, my family was in construction, come from a, an area where there's a lot

• 5:17Speaker 02

  of trades, a lot of blue collars. We framed custom homes in high school. Instead of staying out of trouble, I was on the job site, picking up trash, tote and lumber, doing whatever it was that my brother told me to do. And there was one day when I saw the GC pulled up and the white pickup truck, as we all pretty much know, we drive up here and he got out for a few minutes and he went to where my brother was at. They spoke a little bit. I saw my brother straighten up, posture up and try to talk proper. And I never seen him really do that. So, early on, I was probably like maybe 11, 12 at the time. And when the GC left, he got out from what I can remember just for a few minutes, looked at the plans,

• 6:02Speaker 02

  they nodded, pointed a few times, shook hands, he got back in his truck and he left. And I noticed while there too, he left his truck on, because I could see the water dripping underneath his, underneath his truck. And it was extremely hot, you know, and I didn't like the heat. And I asked him, I said, well, who was that guy? He said, that's my boss. I'm like, your boss? But, you know, I thought you were the boss. He's like, well, I am. I'm the, I'm the framer. We framed the homes, but I work for him. You know, he's the GC. What is the GC? He's the general contractor. And I'm like, wait, let me, let me get this right. This guy. Pulls up to the job site and a, a nice pickup truck gets out, leaves the truck running with the air conditioning on, gets out, you come to where he's at, you bring him the plans,

• 6:45Speaker 02

  hand him the plans, he pulls out the plans, looks over and points and tells you some things to do and then hands you the plan back and then he gets in his truck and leaves. And my brother said, yep, and he's pretty much, he's like, he rides around to the job site, just gets out and look at them and we do all the work. So the seat was planted for me all those years ago, even I didn't recognize it at the time, uh, when I was working as the electrician in the manufacturing plant and pops told me that, I remember thinking back to that time like, well, hey, you know, maybe, uh, maybe I'll go talk to my brother and see, cause I'd already heard too, you know, you can take the exam, pass a, a GC exam and then you could become a general contractor. I was thinking about studying for my electrical license, cause I took to the electrical more

• 7:30Speaker 02

  than any other trade in what I started out for, but I realized there was a ceiling there too. And at the time, I think it was maybe around 40 or 50K and I didn't want a ceiling. That was the key thing with me. I didn't want to have a ceiling at all. I didn't like that feeling. Um, and it kind of slapped me in the face really quickly. I didn't anticipate that, but I knew whatever I was going to do, I wanted to have almost unlimited upward potential. And so I started talking to my brother and asking him about, you know, that role that his boss, uh, fulfilled as a GC. And we, uh, we talked and it was like, hey, you go take the exam, you're smart, you can pass it, you got plenty of book sets is what he told me coming up. He's like, you know, and I'll frame the homes, you know, and then such and such to do the trim and the boxing and the siding and the, uh, the interior

• 8:13Speaker 02

  trim and the masonry. And I did that. I passed the exam and I flunked the first time. I studied for a while and then got overwhelmed because I didn't really know what I was supposed to be studying for. So I just made a decision to go take the exam and see what would happen. Of course I failed, but I learned a lot. And what I learned is, um, just to take action and figure it out as you go. It was one of the first important lessons I ever learned because soon as I realized I failed, I was excited to fail because at least I'd made progress. And after I had left from taking the exam, I went out to my vehicle and immediately started writing down everything that I could remember, every question that I could remember. And I knew there was only like 80 some questions in the exam.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And I kept a notebook handy and over the course of that week or the two weeks after the exam, I was steady taking notes on things that I could remember when I remembered them, until I got to a point where I had over like 120 questions that I had written down, but there was only like 80 questions that I had on the exam. So I knew that, okay, wait a minute, I'm making up stuff now. And I literally just decided to just study that. And I studied it for another couple of weeks and went back and took the exam and passed it within 30 minutes. I looked up and got the same exact exam. It don't happen like that nowadays. So I was very blessed. And I knew when I got it, I had one of the guys tell me, you know, hey, that's a golden ticket that you have there. And no matter what you do, don't ever, you know, let your license lapse. Don't ever,

• 9:38Speaker 02

  you know, don't ever let them lapse, because if you do, you'll have to come back and redo all this again. And so that's kind of like the, you know, the origin story that I've got, how I've got, how I became a general contractor. And from there, I knew at the time, I was 22 years of age, I think, and looked extremely young at the time and knew that I was going to have a hard time getting into the industry and breaking into the industry due to me being young, me being green, had license, but, and honestly, I didn't know anything about the construction industry and was relying heavily on my family at the time to do their scopes of work. But I wanted to learn everything from the ground

• 10:18Speaker 02

  up. So after getting licensed, I decided that I would learn how to read blueprints. I went to another GC that was one of my first mentors. He'd been a GC for years, had a barn full of old plans. And I asked if I could, you know, have some of the plans that he's not using. I wanted to learn how to read the plans. And he told me sure. I went and got maybe four or five sets of plans. And I started looking over them, started studying them. And from there, I wanted to learn how to draw the plans. You know, I learned how to read them by looking at the plans, reading them. And I did a lot of self-study. And I eventually got my hands on, at the time, I couldn't afford the software. So a school

• 11:01Speaker 02

  that I knew, someone that was over a school, implemented soft plan, was a software that we, that I started learning how to draw the plans. So got my hands on an educational version of the software, read the plans, study them night. I just basically became obsessed. When I say that, I don't say that lightly. Like, yeah, I was obsessed with reading, with everything about becoming successful in that lane. I come up as a foster kid, didn't have my mom or my dad in my corner. And so, you know, like a lot of people probably who are in that same situation, we have a different kind of hunger. And mine was to make sure that now that I was becoming a father, that my kids, my family,

• 11:44Speaker 02

  never had to face the struggles that I had to face. And I looked at this as my way of being able to change the path that I was on as a kid and make sure my kids never faced the same things that I faced. And I just made a plan from the very beginning, and that plan was simple. Get the GC license, learn how to read the plans, learn how to draw the plans, go work for a designer to draw plans and make money, getting paid while I, you know, getting paid while I learn, I guess you could say. And so my plan, it worked out almost exactly to the T on how I planned it. I worked for that designer for maybe six months to a year.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  I let him know upfront when I, when I went to his office, told him that I was going to start my own design build business and that I needed to print out a set of plans is the reason why I went to his office. I drew my first project was a barn with the living quarters up top and designed it for the couple, but didn't think far enough ahead to figure out where I was going to print the plans when I got finished with them. And so when I got finished with them, I started looking for a place to print them, and I found a local designer. That's how I got introduced to him. And when I went there to print out the set of plans, he asked me, where did I learn how to draw? And I told him a story about self, teaching myself how to draw. And he was like, are you looking for a job?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  I said, how much is it paying? He told me, you know, he'll, I'll pay you so much per sheet. And landed my job as, my first job as a designer from there. And with the, with the agreement that I would work with him and help him put out the work that he has, as long as I still can learn. But I told him I'd probably only do it for maybe a year or two until I got my first break, because I was looking to start my own design build business. And he kind of laughed and patted me on the shoulder and pulled out the seat and said, you know, well, hey, here's these three plans. How soon can you get them done?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And the situation that happened there that kinda also, and I've noticed in my journey, everything happens for a reason. And he had an opportunity to recommend me to someone that was looking to build, which was part of our agreement. You know, it's like, when I find someone that's not already got a builder, I'll make sure to recommend you. Well, I saw that that didn't happen. And so around the same time, I got my big break, a real estate agent who knew me from when I was a little boy, knew my story, approached me with my first design build client. And I agreed to draw the plans for free, their custom plans, it's about a $450,000 home at the time, and only charged him 10 grand to get started.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And that's how I landed my first deal. And I knew that if I could do that, a lot of people tried to talk me out of it and say, hey, that's too large of a project for you to start out on the first one. Maybe you should just do a bathroom remodel or something. But I knew that either I was going to succeed, or that I was going to fail really fast. But either way, I wanted to find out. And this was the ideal way to find out. Also because I knew that if I did this, nobody would be able to tell me that I didn't have what it takes to be a general contractor, to be a custom home builder, to be a design build company eventually. And we, you know, we took on the job, we knocked it out, knocked it out of the park. And that was the, that was the start to building this company that you see today.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  So you were 23 years old?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  And then how, I mean, I'm just trying to put myself in this couple. How in the world did this couple think it was a good idea to, you know, hire a little 23 year old kid? And you said you looked young, like, were they family? Or how did you convince them to?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  The real estate agent was, you know, she knew me. She knew me from when I was a little boy. But it's like anything else. You know, everybody's got this sign hanging above their head, right? And I didn't know it at the time, but knowing it now, it was the same thing. You know, what's in it for me? Right? And what was in it for the real estate agent and for the client then was they knew that I was green, but they knew also that I had to at least know how to draw the plans because I was willing to draw them for free and they didn't have to pay for the plans. So they were saving probably $2 per square foot at the time on the plans and they're, you know, that's maybe like eight grand, eight to 10 grand right out of the gate by

• 15:59Speaker 02

  not having to pay the price for the plans and agreeing to have a licensed GC because anytime you're doing a loan, you have to have a licensed GC on record to oversee the job. So it checked all the boxes, I guess you could say for them and they're looking at it and the risk versus reward leaned heavily on the side of like, okay, well, you know, this, we're going to save all this money. He's going to, but who are your subcontractors? You know, who's going to do the framing? Who's going to do the masonry? Who's going to do the roofing? And once they saw that I was well insulated with the trades, with the crafts of people that had, you know, 20, 30 years of experience on the team, I think

• 16:41Speaker 02

  they saw that, man, we're probably not going to find this opportunity with anybody else and save 40, 50, 60, $80,000 on our build. And I think that's the reason why they decided to take the chance with me.

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• 17:56Speaker 01

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• 18:35Speaker 00

  Got it. So after that initial success, what elaborated, you know, the months after that? How did you get your second customer?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Advertising.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  While doing that job, I'm always been a creative thinker, and I think outside the box. I don't, I've never thought like the traditional minded builder or GC, I don't think, from the very beginning. Again, I was young, always been at the forefront of technology. And I had this vision of like doing this house and putting a big old billboard out front and laminating the plans for the home that showed the front, left, right, rear elevation, the bird's eye view of the elevation. Got the owner's permission to put that up, you know, out front of their job site, showing the layout of the floor plan and put it out by the road. And this neighborhood was getting a lot of traffic. We was the first custom home in that brand-new neighborhood. So I knew it would get a lot of traffic.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And that's what led to the second job that I've got. That was a 4,000 square foot home. So I literally went from my first job being something that a lot of people told me that I shouldn't take on because of it being right at a half a million dollar project. Out of the gate and then went to my very next project, which was a forty five hundred square foot home, which ended up being, you know, even more money. Now, they saw my design is what captured their eye. They hadn't seen that with any other builder. And they see me building that home that I was building and called me up, set up an interview. And at the time, you know, I was meeting people at their homes. And so I went and met this particular client in their home.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  And when I went in to to meet with them and to show them my estimate, my takeoff. Oh, that's another thing I learned how to do on screen takeoffs at the time as well. Along when I was teaching myself, still about designing, still about, you know, estimating, I found a software even back then that would allow me to trace the blueprints and figure up quantities and things of that nature. And at the time I had a, it was a HP tablet PC, the one that kind of spins around and folds and had to pin on it even back then. So when I walked into the second client's home, he, he opened the door and I said, yes, sir, I'm Raphael Locklear.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And he let me in. And then when I went inside his home, he was still at the door, like opened the door, looking out the door. And he's like, boy, where's your daddy at? He's like, he's like, you, you too young to be coming here trying to build my, build my house and spend all this money. Would you look like a baby? And his wife kind of helped me out. And I said, you know, Troy, boy, you know, leave that boy alone, you know? And so I started showing him what I had prepared for them, which was a takeoff of their project. And, you know, he had dozens of questions, you know, well, hey, where's my, is, did you account for my, for my turnaround, you know, my, my, found in the center of my roundabout for my concrete entry? Did you figure all brick?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  We wanted the, the, the scratch joint for the, the black mortar. Did you factor that in? And we literally went through his takeoff for probably about an hour. And I started repeating myself, answering the same questions that he'd already asked me. And me being so youthful, I was kind of getting a little frustrated, you know what I mean? I was like, yes, sir, here, here's this number, here's that number. And when he asked me one of the questions about the third time, I remember looking, you know, kind of at him a little bit. Perturbed or frustrated and I circled a number. He said, well, you know, well, how much, how much is this costing? How much is that costing? And you know, well, how much are you making off that? And then how much are you making off this? And I remember because it was, it was a moment where we all just stopped and laughed.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  And I took the highlighter and I circled my number that I had on it. I remember what it was. It was forty, forty-four thousand dollars. And I said, you see that number right here? And he's like, yeah. I said, oh, that's mine. And he like looked at me with the laugh and his wife was sitting kind of in the kitchen. And she said, Troy, leave that boy alone and sign the paperwork. And that's how I landed my second deal, you know? And, and, and from there, you know, Troy, he's with me still, you know, to this day. He does some of the BD development for me, you know? So we designed, you know, we built his home back in the day. He raised his family's kids in it. His mother-in-law, we know, we built her, her own suite onto the home.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Got to know him and his family. He was the best man in my wedding and, you know, being one of my best friends, you know, since then. And I tell this, whenever I tell this story, it's kind of, he set me up for the okey doke because I thought that's the way that, I thought that's the way that things would go. Uh, as far as building that type of relationship. But I found out the hard way that's, that's rare, you know, to, to, to find those types of lasting relationships with clients, um, especially to that extent. But he also taught me and showed me early on why I do what I do. And which is the impossible, you know? It's hard to, I tell people, one of the most brutal businesses there is is custom home design building. And the reason why is because the way we've done business and the system that we follow,

• 23:49Speaker 02

  we've developed our own process, but you have to cross every T and you have to dot every I. And even when you can show and prove that you're right, we video document everything, all of our meetings, just like how we're recording this. When we meet clients, everything's recorded onsite, offsite. We use all kinds of technologies nowadays to do those recordings. However, you can do all that and have all your I's dotted and all your T's crossed. But with custom homes, because you're dealing with people and their largest investments, sometimes they don't know what they don't know. And they don't know exactly what the end result's going to look like. And we can do exactly what we say we were going to do on contract, buy the signed plans,

• 24:30Speaker 02

  and get 70, 80% done, and then the owners come in and see the finished product, and it's not what they had in mind, or what, it's not what they had envisioned, even though it's what's on the plans and what we've agreed to and what they picked. And you get that look or that reaction where they're not totally happy. And, you know, if you're someone who does this type of business for the sake of, you know, making people's dreams come true, and of course, we're in it to make money. However, you know, for someone like me, I get just as much, probably even more of a reward, knowing that we're building someone's legacy for them, and knowing that we're doing it at the highest level, and that they're happy not just at the beginning, but also in the middle. And in the end, hopefully,

• 25:15Speaker 02

  they're even happier with us when it's all said and done. And sometimes, no matter what you do, you can't, you can't meet that expectation. We're literally in a business to where you can do 99 things almost perfectly. I don't think anything can be done perfect. But you miss the one thing, and it's that only one thing that people focuses on. And it can be something that you and I see as so insignificant if we don't ask the right questions. You see, this business has taught me over 21 years, I'm not in the construction business. I thought I was in the construction business. I thought I was, but we're not. We're in the people business, especially when we're doing custom homes, which requires us to be good at, at listening, communication, persuasion, reading in between the lines.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Sometimes I'm wearing the hat of a marriage counselor. Sometimes I'm somewhat, I have to be a psychic to kind of try to get an idea of what's going to happen next, and being able to predict the next two or three moves ahead. And with custom homes, I always tell people to, I always tell people that it's the best teacher, though. If you want to get a high level skill set across the board, become a custom home designer and builder. And if you're going to succeed and thrive in this industry, you'll have to check all those boxes, or you won't survive.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  What's been your favorite custom home you've built, or favorite project, favorite customers? Is there, is there a success story where you're talking about that satisfaction? You look back, and you're like, oh, that's, that's the best we got?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Hmm. It's hard to say which one's the best. I've got some that comes up in mind, top of mind first. My favorite would probably be...

• 26:50Speaker 02

  I'd probably say the Crosby Project. And all of our projects, we name, you know, we call them by our clients' name, being their custom homes. And the reason why I would say that's my favorite is not, some people didn't know it would say, oh yeah, of course it's your favorite, it was the largest custom home that you did. But it wasn't necessarily that, it was the fact that I had preconceived notions on what that experience would probably be like. And it ended up not being so, and it ended up being better than what I thought. I went into this particular project, I like challenges, I like challenging myself, and I like doing what most people say is impossible. When I see the word impossible, I see I'm possible. And so I always embrace a challenge, and this one scared me.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  It scared me a lot because of the size at the time. It was a, around 10,000 or 11,000 square foot home. In today's value, that home's probably at least a $4 million home, I would say.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And it was a very unique design. It was weirdly shaped, we had to redesign it. But the biggest thing was this client was a high-profile client. It was a local attorney. And, you know, so that was something like, well, man, he's an attorney. And my mindset at the time was thinking that maybe that type of client would be really challenging, really demanding, maybe somewhat difficult to work with beyond the fact of the project already had its difficulties. We were building on such a tight lot with such a big home. We had to, we had to be extremely precise because if we was off just a little bit, there was no room for error, essentially, hardly at all.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  And it was a very large project. And what I found out during the design and the construction part of this project was that...

• 28:46Speaker 02

  It was my easiest project. I've built and designed custom homes that's 1,800 square feet, 1,500 square feet. And we did this one that was 11,000 or so square feet with garages and unheated space. And I remember going through the middle of it. I was at so much ease during that build. It was really smooth. We had a process that the client honored before, during and after. They trusted us with our process and it was just a smooth, simple build. And when I first started, I thought the opposite.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  And I found that in this industry, typically your larger projects are easier than the smaller projects. At least that's been my experience. And the reason why that was the favorite, of course, it was my largest project. It helped reframe what's possible and it helped change the way I viewed what I was doing and helped me not be so reluctant or afraid to go after bigger projects. Because at first I was thinking bigger means more, more, more risk, more challenging, more difficulties. But for me, I started finding out that that often is the opposite when you have a good process. And I had to learn at that point in time, who is our ideal clients?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Who is not ideal clients? Why? What does that customer avatar look like? And that job started opening up those ideas and those perceptions for me to figure out.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  That's awesome. And I agree 100%. Sometimes the bigger the client, the bigger the pay, the easier it is. It's absolutely wild. So I, what you just said, I can relate to. Some of the biggest customers I had, they was the easiest and it was a win-win.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Marty, producer of the Green Industry Podcast. This episode is over, but check the episode notes for links to products and services that you heard about during the episode. And thanks for listening.