Reading Leadership Books is Great, And Hypergrowth Demand Real Leadership: What It Actually Takes to Lead a Company Through Hypergrowth with Wes Cobb at JLJ Associates

In this episode, Wes Cobb reflects on his career at JLJ, a leading critical infrastructure construction company, and his journey from field operations to project management, finance, and ultimately CEO in 2022. He discusses JLJ's specialized work renovating and upgrading mission-critical facilities, including data centers, hospitals, and telecommunications sites where uninterrupted power and cooling are essential. Cobb shares how the company's rapid growth exposed gaps in its leadership structure, prompting the creation of an executive leadership team, clearer organizational roles, regular leadership meetings, and a structured superintendent training program. He also offers candid insights into his own leadership evolution, emphasizing the importance of having difficult conversations, empowering others instead of micromanaging, and focusing on strategic direction. Looking ahead, Cobb outlines JLJ's commitment to strengthening its systems, expanding its capacity, and achieving sustainable growth while maintaining the quality and consistency that define the company. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 2:09 Hypergrowth Reality Check 4:29 From Field to CFO 5:43 Critical Infrastructure Focus 9:19 The Wake-Up Call 13:43 No Leadership System 15:36 Growth Pressure Mounts 19:33 From Micromanager to Leader 21:36 Meetings Build Alignment 23:00 Training the Next Tier 27:30 Hard Conversations 29:49 Alignment Drives Results 31:22 Ready to Scale Again In This Episode, We'll Discuss ✔️ Wes Cobb's journey from carpenter to CEO of JLJ. ✔️ How JLJ specializes in critical infrastructure renovations for data centers, hospitals, and telecommunications facilities. ✔️ Why rapid growth exposed weaknesses in the company's leadership structure. ✔️ Building an executive leadership team with clearly defined roles and accountability. ✔️ The importance of leadership operating systems during periods of hypergrowth. ✔️ Creating a superintendent training program to develop future leaders. ✔️ The shift from micromanaging to empowering leaders throughout the organization. ✔️ Why difficult conversations are essential for healthy leadership. ✔️ How alignment across the executive team improved consistency, culture, and execution. ✔️ JLJ's vision for continued growth while protecting quality and reputation. Key Takeaways ✔️ Leadership systems matter more than headcount. Sustainable growth requires clear roles, accountability, and structured leadership not simply hiring more people. ✔️ Growth exposes organizational weaknesses. Scaling from $70 million to $150 million forced JLJ to address issues that had previously gone unnoticed. ✔️ Alignment starts at the top. Regular executive leadership meetings created shared direction and improved decision-making across the company. ✔️ Leadership requires personal growth. Cobb learned to stop micromanaging, delegate effectively, and focus on setting strategic direction. ✔️ Training creates long-term capacity. Investing in superintendent development ensures the company can scale without sacrificing quality. ✔️ Difficult conversations build stronger teams. Honest, direct communication became a cornerstone of JLJ's leadership culture. ✔️ Reputation is the ultimate competitive advantage. Maintaining excellence while growing remains JLJ's highest priority. ✔️ Sometimes you have to get better before you get bigger. Building strong systems and capable leaders creates the foundation for sustainable expansion. ✔️ Wes Cobb, CEO of JLJ, shares how he led the company through a pivotal period of rapid growth by transforming both his leadership style and the organization's leadership structure. ✔️ After decades of working in field operations, project management, finance, and executive leadership, Cobb recognized that JLJ's success had outgrown its systems. ✔️ He discusses the challenges of scaling a critical infrastructure construction company, building an executive leadership team, creating accountability through structured meetings, and investing in superintendent training. ✔️ Cobb also reflects on his personal growth as a leader, learning to have difficult conversations, delegate instead of micromanage, and focus on strategic leadership while preparing the company for its next phase of sustainable growth.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Meetings gave us the space to talk about the things that we needed to be talking about. Because now we've gone over these roles, responsibilities, we understand what we're supposed to be doing, even though we're not doing it, we're starting the process to start doing that. And that, that space gave us the, the time together to hold one another accountable and drive alignment in our organization, which is what we were missing.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  If you're a founder who's built something real and now your business can't grow without you in the middle of everything, you're in the right place. I'm Gene Hammond. This is Growth Think Tank, where founders who are ready to stop being the ceiling of their own company, come to think differently, lead better, and build a company that doesn't need them. This is the longest running leadership podcast in the world. Hundreds of Inc. 5000 CEOs have told their stories here. Let's get to work.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Most founders think they need more people to scale. Wes Cobb had people, but what he didn't have was a leadership operating system. And his company was doubling in size without him. Today, he tells you what actually happens when you've got to lead your company through hypergrowth. And it's not really built on the strong foundation of leadership. All right. My next guest is someone that I've known since high school. And to be honest, we weren't that close back then. We've grown to know each other since working together, much better than we ever did before. Because Wes was in the athlete community. And he ended up marrying one of my really good friends, Holly, who's got just this huge heart. And we've known each other for literally about 40 years or more. But what's really interesting is he didn't hire me because of that connection. He hired me because he had been listening to my podcast.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  He'd been thinking about leadership for a long time, reading books to improve his leadership. But it wasn't happening for him. And his company was about to go through a really huge phase of hypergrowth. And today, we're going to go back in time a little bit. We're going to talk about some of the work that we did. Wes is going to be really open and candid with us about everything. And I'm just so excited to share this story with you. He was listening to a podcast, just like you're listening today, and something triggered, something landed for him, and he knew it was time to make a change. And so he asked me to connect with him because we're friends. We went to have breakfast and it ended up being, I think, the longest breakfast of my life. It's probably over two and a half hours where he was able to start to articulate some of the challenges

• 2:17Speaker 02

  that they were having as an organization and the excitement he had about the growth that was on the horizon. But he knew he wasn't ready yet. He needed that leadership operating system, but he didn't quite know what to do. Even though he had studied leadership for years, he didn't know how to put it together. And he also didn't know how to bring his executive leadership team along that journey because it's a touchy situation. Feelings can get hurt, but each one of the, the partners he had were very strong and coachable and they stepped up in a major way. And that's the reason why we were able to get this transformation to find alignment. So if you're going through hyper growth, this is the episode for you. Wes leads Jerry L. Johnson and Associates, a 40-year-old construction company in the middle of doubling

• 2:59Speaker 02

  from 70 million to 150 million and with no executive leadership structure, no rules, no responsibilities for everyone, no training program for the new hires and no real shared vision. Great people, but didn't have the leadership systems to build on. And that's where we came in. Let me welcome Wes Cobb to the show. Hey Wes, how are you doing?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Hey Gene, I'm doing great, man. Good seeing you.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I wish we were in person, but we'll, we'll have to make do with this video today. I've already introduced our audience a little bit about our background, our friendship even, but I haven't told them much about JLJ. So I'd love for you to tell us about JLJ and how you became the CEO.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So at first I've been here full-time for 34 years. That's probably the first thing you know. I worked part-time here before that summer stuff, that kind of stuff. So when I started in 1992, full-time, I had just transferred from University of Georgia to Georgia State University to finish up, you know, my degree at night and work during the day for the company. And, and it was not something that I really at the time thought I wanted to do. Even though I had agreed to come join the company, it was, it was a tough thing, right? Because as you know, I was actually going to school to pursue another career. And then I left that opportunity to come, to come here. So, and I worked in the field for the first, I guess, eight or nine years.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  My father, you know, forced me to work in the field and to learn construction, learn what we do for our customers. So. That was invaluable. So I spent eight or nine years in the field working as a carpenter, carpenter helper, assistant superintendent, superintendent. And then eventually, right around 2000, early to mid 2000, he brought me into the office to start project managing. So now I'm not in the building anymore. I'm in the office and I'm managing projects scattered, you know, around Georgia, maybe some work in the Southeast. And a project managed for probably 14 years. I did that 13 to 14 years. And then somewhere in that process of me project managing around 2008,

• 4:54Speaker 00

  2009, our company started growing. We doubled in size around that time. And we didn't have, you know, like anybody really watching the finances. So I became in 2014, I became the CFO. We didn't have CFO. We had a treasurer, right? So we had to, we had to make it up, honestly. And and I had to kind of grow that role. So that's what I ended up doing from 2014 to about 2022, 23, somewhere in there, I acted as the CFO the whole time. About 2018, I became the CEO. So anyways, that's, that's the story. I became the CEO really, really full time, starting in, you know, 2020.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  One of the things that you didn't really give us much information on, maybe just a couple of sentences on, what does JLJ do?

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, sorry. So what we do best, we are what we consider a critical infrastructure general contractor. So we support the industries that have critical infrastructure, stuff like telecommunications companies, data centers, hospitals, we want any type of facility that cannot be, you know, just turned off or have the power or cooling system disrupted by accident. Everything we do is, not everything we do, a lot of what we do is, is exactly that critical infrastructure renovation work. Now, we are a general contractor. We do a little bit of everything. We do other municipal jobs that are, you know, not, not very hard to do, in my opinion. But, but our bread and butter, what we're known for is critical infrastructure upgrades and renovations.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  The things that stood out to me is, you know, we're kind of Having a boom right now with data centers, but you guys don't really build data centers, but you renovate them, you, you, you improve them so that they can handle, I guess, more.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, and that's kind of our niche, right? That's kind of what we, so we want to, so we want to be. We've always been involved with data centers. My, my dad built data centers nineteen seventies. This is not some new thing. Back then, they were, they were what we call enterprise data centers. And they're still called that today. A lot of companies have, but it housed information that they used internally. Very common. Matter of fact, a lot of today's data centers are going back to some of the same technologies that he put in, or they put in, the industry put in back in those days, and, and they're going back to it. And it's, it's, uh, it's, it's time-tested and works. So it's something that we have always done, and we felt like we, we do really well in that niche of going in and renovating

• 7:19Speaker 00

  an existing data center that needs whatever, more, more cooling, more power, just technology changes, and there's an renovation there for whatever reason. When you go into a, a working environment where you've got to go in and modify that infrastructure, utility infrastructure, it's, it's difficult. Everything is planned out. Everybody gets an opportunity to, to see what we're doing in detail. We write out what we call method of procedures, and they're extremely detailed. And, and then we finally progress with the work once everybody agrees that we can go do it. So it's, it, it's, it's a tough working environment, but the reason that we get drug around the United States,

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I think, and, and do a lot of this work for our customers is the fact that we're, we're really good at that work. And, and we want to stay in that niche. A lot of the big general contractors, they want to build these big data centers where they're out there for three or four, five years. And it's just, for us, it's not what we want to do. I'd rather them go build that new, new data center. Typically, when they do that, they end up building what they call data halls. They build a building, and they may build out, you know, ten data halls, or, or construct ten data halls, but eight of them will be empty. The first two get populated with IT server equipment. Within the other eight are sitting there waiting for future growth. The big GCs don't want to do that. They don't want to go build out that.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Next data hall, we do, that's exactly what we do. We want to build out those data halls and we're, we're doing that now. That's, that's some of the stuff that we're seeing.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  That gives a good context, Wes, around the work that you guys do. Before we dive into the project, you know, I've already told them that you're, you're an old friend from high school, but you've also been a long time listener of the Growth Think Tank podcast. You, you know, you're studying leadership and everything. And I, I know that I can't remember what this was. So maybe I'm kind of searching through my memory banks. We had that long breakfast one day when you reached out to me. I don't know if you were listening to something I said on the podcast or just finally had reached a point of, I need to ask for help. Do you remember what was going on at that moment?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a culmination thing. So yes, I was, I was spending a lot of time on the road. So I was listening to a lot of your podcasts during that time. It was, it was cock. I mean, do that on the road. And it was other, it was other, you know, some other podcasts too, right? You get the other information from a lot of places. I was studying stuff like EOS, right? I, I spent 10 years and honestly, that, that 10 years, I would start that time right around 2014, 15, when I became the CFO. I didn't know what it meant to be a CFO of a $70 million company, right? It's not what I did. I didn't go to school for that. So I really dove in hard and learned what that meant. And then I became the CEO, right?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I, I didn't know, I certainly didn't know how to be a CEO. Nobody tells you what to do when you're CEO. You got to figure it out. And, and so I spent probably 10 years of diving deep, reading all kinds of leadership books, right? Listening to podcasts, your podcast included, just, just seeking and trying to learn what, what we needed to be doing here at JLJ. And, and you're a big part of that, right? And I, I, I've known you for a long time. I, I admired you and I felt like you were the person I could turn to and, and have a good conversation. Cause you know, it's, it's one of those things, you know, it's a lot of energy. When you decide you're going to, you need help and you need to go do something and, and learn how to do it better.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Well, the last thing you want to do is, is set sail and find out you're on the wrong ship, right? You, you, it's a lot. It's, it's money. There's always money involved with it, but more important than. Money is time. You don't want to get six months into something and feel like I should have went a different direction. I have messed up and we're out here in the middle of the ocean now and I need to go back to shore and start this trip over again. I did not want to have that happen. I felt like you were the right person, that you would listen, that we could have a good conversation and we could set sail in the right direction to begin with. And that's what that first meeting was about when I sat down with you. You know, I had done a lot of homework. I did feel like I had a

• 11:21Speaker 00

  a good feel for some of the things that needed to be done, but I didn't feel like I was the change agent that that I could just walk in and get it done. And I needed somebody that could help me do, you know, lead that charge. And then also at the same time, uh, work with our team to make sure that you're holding us accountable to actually do it. And that's, that's exactly what that first meeting was about.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Do you remember like kind of what was going on specifically within the organization that you just, maybe you were fed up with something, maybe you're fed up with yourself. I don't know what it was, Wes, but I know.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  And there's progress about this kind of stuff, right? The more you read, the more you search and you know, the more that you, that you know, right? Well, then you start analyzing yourself, your organization against all that information that you've learned. And I got disheartened, right? I got where I felt like, and it was a leadership failure on my part. It was me, right? That allowed this to go on. Once I got to this point where I felt like I knew we need to make these changes, big, big changes, whatever they are. But I just, I just didn't do it right. I've walked around here for several years and, and really got disheartened. Like, uh, we need to be better and I didn't know how to make us better.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  And, and I wasn't happy. It was probably time in my life that, you know, if I had, I probably could have retired if I wanted to, to be honest with you. I could have said, okay, I'm, I'm a little tough, right, for everybody, but I probably could have done that. And that's not what I wanted to do. It wasn't the best thing for the company for the future. So I had figured, uh, I knew we needed to address it. And, and that was, that was started with getting with you to get you to help us to address the situation. Cause I wasn't happy. I was not happy at work.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  If you're listening to this show, chances are you're a founder who's built something significant, but you're still too deep in the day to day to see the path forward. That's exactly what the Founder Freedom Strategy Call is for. It's free. Forty minutes with me personally and we'll pinpoint exactly what's keeping you stuck and what you need to do about it. Book your time with me at my personal URL, schedulewithgene.com. Now, back to the podcast.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Let's dive into to the real heart of this. You were running about a $70 million company back then. We're going back in time because you're much bigger than that now. And, you know, what did day-to-day leadership look like at JLJ at that point? You know, what were you doing? What do you, what did you know that you shouldn't be doing? Give us a little bit of insight in that. Was not a whole lot of leadership. I was still mainly acting as a CFO, right? And that was probably 80% of my energy. And then the other 20% of my energy was, was dealing with problems as people brought problems to me, whatever they were. Yeah, half the time I'd be acting like a project manager, helping out project managers do a project management stuff. It was, it had nothing to do with being a CEO of a company.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  And then not only that, you know, we had, you know, we had redid our organizational chart and we had a C. I have two partners. I guess I should make this clear. I've got two equal partners in this company. And, and one of them has been here nearly as long as I have, 32 years or so, full time. The other one worked here for four or five years in early 1990s, left, had another career for about seven or eight years, nine years, something like that, and came back to work for us. And in 2002, I think it was, and he is now our COO. So the guy who's been here for 32 years, Will is our current president. Brian is our COO. We hired, I mentioned earlier, we hired a new CFO

• 14:50Speaker 00

  in 2002, I guess, fall of 2022. And we had made a young man the vice president who'd been here a long time. He was kind of over the operations of the company. None of us, other than the CFO, none of us were doing our roles. I mean, that CFO was a CFO when she got here. She knew what she was doing. So she was the only one actually really acting in her capacity. Rest of us weren't. I mean, we weren't. Nobody, nobody knew what to do to be a CEO. I didn't know what that meant to be a CEO of a company.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  It's really interesting, Wes, because I know you mentioned about reading a lot of books and I think you had told me over a hundred leadership books, which I'm a big reader too. And what's the difference between knowing something and actually, actually being able to implement it inside your company?

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard, man. And I need to back up and say one more thing. One, one thing that was also going on at this time, when I, when I sat down with you, you had that breakfast. You know, we were a seventy-ish million dollar a year company up at that time, but we had just finished. We got an odd fiscal year in, but so, so sometime that January of 2025, we had just finished our first quarter and we had built more than fifty million dollars in one quarter. So I knew there was a problem, problem brewing, right? Any, any, any problems, any foundational errors we had in this company, it was fixing to come to light. Cause I knew that we were, we were in a year that we were probably going to double in revenue. I wasn't sure exactly, but we were estimating that year that we were in to probably jump to a hundred and fifty million dollars. So that was going on in the background also, right?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  That, that was one of the things that I kind of threw the blanket on and said, look, man, you got to figure this out. You know, you're really too late. You need to have already done this. Now you need to be a CEO of this company because if you've got problems, they're fixing to come, they're fixing to come up. And so that, that was, that was also going on in the background at the time. And was probably the biggest catalyst, right? That made me get off my butt and say, we got to go do something. So that, that was the biggest thing that kind of pushed me out there and led me to you.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  You've read a lot of leadership books and what's the difference between knowing something and actually implementing inside a company?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  You know, some of it's confidence, right? And I consider myself to be a person who has a lot of confidence, but, but when you've not done something and you know this, you know this about me, right? I've coached my whole life. I've coached like Little Esports and, and, and of course some high level athletes, like in wrestling, you know, high school wrestling and stuff. We have some of the best, we have had some of the best athletes in the state of Georgia come through our wrestling program. So I've, I've been involved with sports. Programs like that, but you know what? I know how to coach wrestling. I used to wrestle. I don't, I don't have that problem there. I can dive in and get, get through the details of that with, with no troubles whatsoever.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  I've never run a company like this. I've never run any construction company, much less one that was about to be at a hundred fifty million dollars a year. So some of the struggles confidence, right? I don't, you, you think you know what to do, but you're not confident that you, that you know that. And then certainly don't, don't know, well, how do I do this? And I've got to go take this message to my other two equal owners. And say, look, man, I, I realize we're, we're a forty plus year old company at the time. And we all seem to be happy around here, except for me. Everybody else was pretty happy. And, and go, go to them and tell them we need to change. We need to get better than we are. And to be that person that's going to deliver that message and then, and then carry it through it, it's, it's tough.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  And I felt like it was more than what, more than what I could do on my own, even though I read all those books and even though I, I had all this knowledge in my head. I think I told you, one of my analogies was when you mentioned one of our meetings, we sat down and you're like, ah, you know, you were the quarterback, you're always a leader. And that was true. I think my comment to you was, yep, I was the quarterback, but I didn't call the plays. The coach sent the plays in. I just executed the plays, you know, and then, and being a CEO is like being that coach, right? That offensive coordinator. You know, you got to figure it out. You're the one that's, you're the one that's calling these plays and setting the direction of this company. And I, I, I didn't feel confident at the time doing that.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  It's a pretty good analogy. I know we both have a, a good understanding of sports and maybe our audience does too. But like you can be the quarterback, but you can't be the quarterback and the coach. It just, it's never happened in football. It might've been in baseball, but that's an exception and the, the analogy being that you, you can't step out on the field when you're the coach. You can't say, let me show you how it's done in the middle of a game.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Right, right. That's exactly right.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  And be the firefighter, be the project manager that you were talking about. So you have to learn to lead from the side. And that's, that's what leadership really is, empowering people and whatnot. And that's one of the things that you guys had to learn.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  I was used to being a micromanager. I was used to jumping in and helping anyone with whatever the task was because I'd done it. I was the person right here who had done all the things. So I had to stop doing that.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  It's a common thing that I run into with our clients and it really comes back to this, Wes. You get it. You look at patterns. You know, you've seen this before. What got you here won't get you to the next level.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  That's all right.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  As your company was growing from 70 to 150 million, you were smart enough to go realize money might not fix this problem. It might actually break us.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  And building a stronger leadership foundation, what we do, what we're known for, and that you reached out to us. I really appreciate that. I mean, it means a lot to me. I know we were friends, but you didn't hire me because we're friends.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it had nothing to do with it, honestly. It just happened to be a nicety that came along with it.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And we got a little bit closer since then. So it's been a fantastic side benefit to this. Let's jump back into this because I know there were many different things we tackled and addressed. There were things like roles and responsibilities. There was executive leadership team meetings and rhythm. What stands out has been the most impactful of those things that we worked on in a very short period of time because we only worked together for about three or four months.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  It was pretty intense, right? It really was. And there was plenty to do. And I'm going to add a little bit to this thing, right? So as part of my gaining knowledge, we had made a decision that we wanted to be part of a peer group, right? Which is, many industries have these. In our industry, you join them and you're in a peer group with general contractors all over the United States. We don't compete against one another. We meet twice a year in person, twice a year not in person. And literally, they get to look under your skirt. They see everything about your company. We knew we wanted to do that. And one of my things was, why in the world do I want to join a peer group when I already know that we're broken at the top of this company? Why? I don't need to go to the doctor. I don't want to be way overweight and then go to the doctor

• 21:29Speaker 00

  and have them tell me I'm fat. I know I'm fat. Let me fix that before I go see the doctor, right? So that was another catalyst, right, to get us in there. And I say that to say, what I think the single biggest thing was, was we started that. Executive leadership team and we developed those roles and responsibilities and we started having regularly scheduled meetings about every two weeks, three, you know, if it stretched out a little bit, it was tough. But those meetings gave us the space to talk about the things that we needed to be talking about. Because now we've gone over these roles, responsibilities, we understand what we're supposed to be doing, even though we're not doing it. We're starting the process to start doing that.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  And that that space gave us the the time together to hold one another accountable and drive alignment in our organization, which is what we were missing more than anything.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  You know, I know one of the things that I was able to to uncover, and I think it was known, but it just wasn't being, because you weren't having the meetings, you weren't bringing it up. But you knew you needed to hire people to grow. And specifically in your world, it's called that superintendent. And when we dove into this, because I do an assessment first, I'm not trying to jump in and just tell you what to do. But that was one of the things that's like, hey, we we have great talent now that needs to be trained. And we need to create a pathway for the next talent that comes through, because I think we can even grow bigger, which you have. And you've hired, I think you said 27 people in about 14 months.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Months, yes, sir.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  But you fixed that one choke point of your business. Tell us just a little bit about that process.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you're 100% right, right? Because at the time, we're going through this this growth, the people that were working for us had been here a long time. They were, we were all professionals at what we're doing. Now, we were working like crazy, everybody was trying to keep up with this pace, which we knew we couldn't do. So we knew we had to bring these people in. And we didn't have any type of formal training for anybody. And yes, superintendent is the, that is, that is the person who leads, you know, that's what we do, right? That is the service that we provide. They are the person on site that's responsible for providing our construction services. So we knew that we needed to get some training done and you you quickly pointed that out to us and and we dove in, right?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  We we went, just like I had to go to my partners and say, hey, we're not good enough, we need to get better. Let's start this executive leadership team meeting, start doing all these things. Then we had to go to these forty superintendents, most of which have been around here for decades, right, and say, you know what? We're having to go through training, we're having to get better. You've got to get better also. That's another hard message to deliver to people that have been with you for a long time. So that was a tough thing. They all embraced it, right? The ones that didn't embrace it, then they left, right? And that's part of growth, too. It's going to happen as things are changing. And then on top of that, this addition of twenty seven people,

• 24:25Speaker 00

  that was really to start growing some capacity in our company because we knew we were doing a lot more work. We needed more people because the volume was increasing. But we honestly, and I may have told you, we've talked about this story, I think, and it sticks in my mind a lot about Truitt Cathy and that he was in a board of directors meeting. Years ago, everybody knows about Boston Market. Well, twenty years ago, they were growing like crazy. And Truitt Cathy's sitting in a board meeting and the people in his board meeting, his other board members are, everybody's talking about Boston Market and how they're growing and how their restaurants are popping up everywhere. And Cathy's listening to him and eventually he pounces this down on the table and says, listen, we're going to get better. We're not going to get bigger.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Once we get better, our customers will demand that we get bigger. And that was part of this capacity to growth, right? Let's get these people hired. Let's get this training process started. They built a structure that we can actually train people in. And then as we do this, as we start getting better and getting more trained, we're going to get better while we do. And then our customers are going to require us to get bigger. So we turn down more work right now than we've ever turned down. And we're doing that on purpose because we know that we are not there yet. I think we might have even slightly underestimated this training effort. It's not so hard with the people that have been here with us for some time, ten years or more, whatever, maybe five years.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  But these twenty seven people that we've hired in the last fourteen months, man, these people are coming from all sorts of industries that are new. Not construction. They have made a decision in life. Some of these people are have quit some other profession right now. They're starting a second life that they decided want to be in construction. That is a much more difficult person to train, right? That that is not something that happens in six months. That person's going to be getting training for probably for two years or something close to it. So we realized that and now we're we're kind of hitting the brakes on on pursuing. Growth. We're trying to get our internal growth right, our training right, so that we that we.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  The only thing you have in our world is reputation. If you're going to build a niche and you're going to be the best general contractor in critical infrastructure renovation work, you better be the best. At that work because once you get a bad reputation, you're not going to be doing that work anymore. So we realize that we know we got to guard that and that's what our training is all about.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  You know, I'm I'm smiling when I say this because I just had a new construction client, much smaller than you guys. They're probably around seven million. And I told that same story about getting better before you before you tried to get bigger because, you know, and and maybe this is a cliche for everyone listening in, but you know, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. And you had to rebuild the leadership that was sort of ignored as you were just growing. I want to, you know, as we begin to land a conversation here, a couple more questions. And this one's really about you, Wes. You know, how would you name the the shift inside yourself when you think about leadership? Not the tactics, not the tools, but you know, how you actually think about leadership today after working with us?

• 27:31Speaker 00

  You know, here's here's the thing I think that comes along with leadership and it's learning how to have conversations that you really don't want to have, right? Most of us try to avoid, you know, what I would say, difficult conversations. And I should have pointed this out earlier. One of the things that we did as a as executive leadership team, once we got one started, was read your book, How to Have Tough Conversations. Because because they were needed, right? We were sitting in these meetings and and we all had points we wanted to make that someone could take offense to, right? Take it personally. Hey, that's that's me you're talking about, right? I don't see it that way. And that that's that's probably been my biggest change. Is I am I am by nature a nice person, right?

• 28:12Speaker 00

  And I want to be, I want to be polite to people, like to be funny, tell jokes, all that kind of stuff. But there are times that you've got to have some very direct conversations. And you don't make it personal. And, um, and I, I tell these stories as we start doing our training classes, superintendents. I go to some of these, all these meetings and I have a, I, I open the meetings up and I, I tell everyone. Um, and I know this through my coaching experiences, um, you know, people take coaching, people take training. When you're, when you're doing it directly, they take it one of three ways, right? They're going to take it, they're going to take it and be offended by it, take it personal like. Hey man, you're not talking about me, that's not me, right? They're, they're, and then they, and then they want to, they want to, they want to argue about it, right? That's one way. I've dealt with athletes like that. I've dealt with employees that way.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Then you've got the second group of people that, that you reinforce this like, uh, this insecurity in them. I'm never going to be good enough. I can't, I can't do this kind of thing, right? You, you reinforce that through this coaching, unbelongst to you, you're doing this, right? And then you've got that third group of people, the ones that I love, that are coachable, right? They take what you've got to say and they get better, right? So that's, that has been my biggest thing, right? Is to understand people, know that you've got to have direct conversations with them with a goal of making them better. And, and it might be hard, but it's got to be done.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  We've talked about a lot of things today. I, I kind of want to begin to wrap it up with. You work, you talked about really the issue was leadership systems and, and alignment. What has been the value of going through this process over that, that three month period?

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Man, I, you know, I, I honestly feel like that alignment you speak about that, that is, that is key. Right. To a company, I think especially of our size, right? As we, as we've grown and grown and grown, I, I feel confident when I come into this office, that our executive team, we're all rowing the boat in the same direction. You know, nobody's over here trying to go off doing their own thing and, and we're having to go deal with that. We're on the boat in the same, same direction. So our energy is put, you know, where it needs to be. And I, I think that is absolutely. Key that alignment because it's easy. We got, we got about a hundred employees, just about just under a hundred employees right now. And any company, right? I, I don't see all the people. I don't, I don't see most of the people anymore.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Other people that work for this company are going out and they're the ones that are talking with our superintendents and visiting our clients and seeing our subcontractors on job sites. It's not me. I used to do that. I'm not that person anymore. It's, it's everybody else is doing that kind of stuff. And we were missing that alignment that now I feel, I feel comfortable when anybody from this office or anybody in, in a leadership role, project management role, whatever it is, when they go out and they represent this company, that alignment has been driven down to those various levels in our organization. And, and people are delivering the same message, right? I think we are getting, we're being seen now by everybody, customers, subcontractors, everybody we, we deal with, vendors, suppliers. We're, we're very consistent.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yes. Thank you so much. Last question here. Just what's next now that you've built this foundation of leadership for J O G?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Well, we're, we're going to leave this, uh, we are in this little pause mode right now of just trying to get better. The next step is, is we're hoping here and within the year or so that, that we're going to go after, you know, more work, expansion. We're building up the capacity. We're going to train that capacity. And we're looking to take this company, we want to double again. I say we want to double again. If the work is there that we want to do, then, then we want to continue growing. Cause we, we feel like we're, we're, we're laying down a lot of customers, right? People who that we, we do work for. They want us to do more work for them. We, we can't do it. So we want to pursue these opportunities

• 32:03Speaker 00

  and, uh, and continue to grow this company. And it's not, it's not to get, the thing that my dad used to teach me a long time ago is son is when you're running a company, you know, it's, it's more than the company. It's more than you. It's, it's the families. And it's not just the families of our employees, right? It's the families of the people who work with us or subcontractors, everybody that, that depends on us to, to help them get their work done. Right? We're, we're, we're affecting their families in some ways and, and we. We want to be, we want to be good to all those families. We want to grow, right? We want everybody to get better. And so it's not, it's not a selfish reason. It's really, it's, it's, it's our employees. You know, we, we think we have some of the best employees

• 32:45Speaker 00

  and we want better for them. And that, that takes us getting better and us growing our company.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Fantastic, Wes. Thanks for being a part of the podcast. Thanks for being my friend and thanks for really being coachable because you were that third part of this and, and your, your partners too, Will and Brian and anyone else we interacted with. Fantastic people that were willing to grow and it's not always easy.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  It's not. Hey, and I meant to say this earlier when we got started the podcast. I want to take this officially, I'm sure I've said this in the past, but to thank you, right? It was, it was tough. You jumped in here, you and Amanda both, and y'all got, y'all got involved with us and you guys helped us tremendously. You, you got us headed in the right direction and we, we, we took it from there and things are going fantastic and we really appreciate y'all.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Thanks, Wes.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Sir. Thank you, Gene.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Now, another great episode here on the show. I know I say that every time, but this one's really special to me because Wes is a friend of mine, but he grew to be a client and we've gotten to be closer since then. I was a little concerned about this when I got into it as being friends. Would he be coachable? But it turns out, not only was he coachable, he and his team stepped up in a major way. I am so proud of the work they've done. I'm so proud of being a part of that. But they're building something that's really quite amazing at this company. They're building a stronger culture and that culture is going to be handed down to the next generation, the third generation of family to really take this business to the next level. At least that's the intention, to build legacy, a hundred year old company. And they're on the path of it finally.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  And I really enjoyed working with Wes and his team on this and it was an honor to share the story with you on the podcast. I love the work we're doing. If any of this has resonated with you, if you have any questions, you can book a call with me. Just go to schedulewithgene.com. It really is that easy and I'd love to help you. When you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of Growth Think Tank. As always, we encourage. We'll see you next time.