This is Waste to Wealth, a podcast about turning your waste hauling business into a profitable, scalable cash flowing machine. And now, here's your host, Michael So this is for the Waste to Wealth podcast. So you're Tom DiJohn and you're joining me from Buffalo, New York. You're here in Raleigh for a few days. So thanks for coming on. Thanks Yeah, well, we did have a lot of rain this week, but today is nice weather. So that's good for you, because it's probably It's around 70 degrees. So yeah, Yeah, as you know, I like buffalos quite a bit. So actually, I don't know if I told you this, but the reason why, so Buffalo finances is my company's name. So I wanted, I like buffalos because they're not afraid of anything. They're tough animals. Did I tell you about how they run through storms? Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's why we like them because they're, There's some big storm coming towards them. They actually charge towards it and run through it instead of running away from it. Well, it was named after Buffalo Bill, who was a cowboy, but So I don't know why they named it. Maybe it's because it was a very Western city at Because America was a lot smaller. than it is now. Now we've got buffalos that are part of America instead of just cowboys that went to the prairie, I assume. I don't know. A lot of history in Buffalo. So we were talking on our other recording, which we'll try to merge with this one, but you already talked about Kingdom Factor and what you do there, and that's a mastermind for business owners, and it's Christian-based, so it covers a bunch of things, right? You said it really covers three pillars of your life, right? What were those three pillars So it's your professional life, your personal and spiritual side of life, and knowing that, you know, Those things overlap. If you're not doing well or struggling in one area, it does spill over into those other two areas pretty well. So if you're having challenges at home or issues with your children or your wife or your spouse, it does affect you while you're at It definitely does. They're not separate. They're not silos. You can try to make them silos, but you're never successful and they definitely affect each other. especially Even if you don't outwardly show that or people may not see it internally, it's hard. And you can turn out to not be as productive or as clear-minded in those other areas. you know, you don't perform well or as Yeah. Well, I think a healthy way it looks in a healthy way is where each one sets you up to be successful. So, I like to be productive. I'm a workaholic. When I go home, I need to not be in that mode because it drives my family crazy. If I'm Mr. Productivity at home, my wife goes crazy, my kids go crazy because I'm on them about cleaning things and making sure stuff is orderly and running smoothly. And I need to turn that off and recharge at home. So home has become a recharge place for me. And my family likes that. And so I go into a healthy mode, and that sets me up for success next time I go to work the next day. So I'm recharged, ready to go back to work and be productive. You can't always be You can be on a lot, you can be in productive mode a lot, but you can't be 24-7, because you will definitely burn out, or burn out And other areas suffer too, like your ability to, You It's hard to be motivated to do things like that when you're on all Yeah. Yeah. My wife says that I'm much more fun to be around after I've worked out. So if I do my workout at the end of the day, like the Michael pre-workout is not that fun. But as soon as I do my workout, I'm just in a great mood. I've got endorphins in my bloodstream. So I worked out this morning, and I feel great. I have tons of energy. Now, sometimes you work out to where you're exhausted, go to failure on things, and then you're dragging. So there's a healthy balance there. I did my 1,000 touches. So I showed you the Australian football yesterday. I try every morning after my workout, go to my garage, I throw the ball around. I've been trying to touch the ball a thousand times. I did that this morning. Makes me feel so good because now I can palm it. I got Your hands are thicker though, like your fingers are muscular. Probably beat me in a- arm wrestling contest pretty easily. Well, normally we talk about how people can connect with you at the end of an interview, but why don't we talk about that now at the beginning of the interview? So if people are interested in what you're doing and they wanted to know more about Kingdom Factor, what's The best way is I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, and it's under my name, Tom Dija, which is spelled D-I-J-O-H-N. The company is And we, and I also have email, which is easy to get ahold of me through that. But yeah, just feel free to message me on LinkedIn. What's your email address? Email is Okay, great. Great. And then Instagram. It's your name, right? Yeah, it's my name on Instagram. It's Tom. Is it Tom underscore DiJohn Yep. Yeah, because we're friends on Instagram. It's Yeah, Instagram, and I'm working, trying to develop that. So yeah, please reach I like it. Social media has been a little bit overwhelming for me because there's so much. It just becomes a rabbit hole. You go through that doom scrolling, and I hate doom scrolling. But I found that I can get a lot of good information now that so many experts put their information on there, and I can follow them, and I really take advantage of when there's a thumbs down. On YouTube, there's a thumbs down. I always use that to let the algorithm know, hey, I don't like this. Don't show this to me. I remember when I first went on TikTok, they were showing me all kinds of stuff I hated. I was like, oh, this is horrible. So I purposefully hearted anything I liked Yeah, the algorithm is a nice one when you utilize it that way. So, yeah, I agree. So what do you see on your TikTok My stuff is going to be financial advice from reputable people. And a lot of those people actually share what other people are giving as bad advice and sharing the real advice. That's one of my major things, to see a lot of trash things, so junk haulers, dumpster rental, and waste collectors, because that's my passion. And then working out, so lots of exercises. So I have way too many ideas about how to exercise that I can't implement because I'd be exhausted all the time. Like how to run faster, how to kick a ball better. So for me, it's, there's a lot of different business influencers that are on there that I'll come across, but I have a strong passion in mountain biking and things like that. So I see a lot of those things and carnivore diet recipes. So meat only. You don't eat any vegetables? No. I mean, very rarely, very minimally, you know, Everything you need is in meat, so it makes sense that that would work. You're basically a lion. You're a lion that walks around. Yeah, you could say that. You Yes, I see a lot of faith-based things out there. It's I do get a lot of that too. In some military stuff, every time I see something military, I think it's very cool, like big planes or battleships or war stories, real war stories. I don't like any fiction stuff. I get very bored with fiction. So if a movie clip comes up, I'm not interested in that, because it's not real, and there's plenty of cool, real stuff. So a lot of scripture, Bible lessons, and Also, military history. I feel like such a novice when it comes to the military because I didn't serve. Yeah, me neither. But it is very interesting. It's also interesting how much information you can process in such a short clip. It's different than when you're younger and you watch a movie or a TV show. It's a much longer format. Everything moved much slower. Way slower. If you go back and watch Star Wars, probably about 15 years ago, I did a Star Wars marathon where we watched, there was only six Star Wars movies at a time. We watched episodes one through six in order. The first three episodes, which are the bad ones compared to the originals, there was a lot happening. There was multiple storylines happening at the same time. They really cut from here to there, and they were fast-paced. Then when we got to the originals, Episode 4, which is A New Hope, which is iconic, it was so slow and boring. Yeah, we get it. They're in the desert. When are they going to get out? And yet they would cut to other scenes, but there wasn't anything dramatic happening. So I like today. I'm a big fan of today and where we've gotten Yeah. I'm more leaning towards the old school way of doing things. And it was funny even with our kids. We were watching a movie and it was done by Angel Studios. And I forget the name of the movie, but the pace was much slower. in the top like a Hallmark, like a Hallmark movie, almost like it was about wrestling story, supposedly a true story about a wrestler out in the Midwest, coming back to his hometown as a coach. But the boys, my oldest and my youngest, my oldest He lost interest after five, 10 minutes. He's like, when is this But my youngest, he stayed engaged and watched it That's interesting, your younger son had more attention span. Yeah. Crazy. Well, we talked yesterday about a few of these questions, you know, why you started your business. We covered that already. One thing that I'm always curious about is when you go into business, you have this idea of what it's going to be like, and it's always wrong. There's always aspects that are wrong about it. That was definitely true for me. I'm sure that was true for you. And you're going to keep learning things. We all keep learning things on this journey. but this entrepreneurial adventure. So what's something that you thought was going to, things were going to go that you I think the biggest thing is the amount of time, like when you first looked at, when I first looked at the business model of being a kingdom factory coach and building groups, and going through the tram, like, oh, this should not be a big deal. I mean, I know I have to do the things that are necessary to build up the business or build relationships. But yeah, it was a hard lesson. They're saying, oh, gosh, this is taking much more time. Right. And and unfortunately for my wife, you know, she had the expectation, same as what I have, you know, tell him we'll work on this, uh, you know, three or four days a week. And, you know, we'll be able to build this up. And when it turns out happening is it's not just three or four, not three or four days a week, which is still a lot of time. There's still a lot of time, but you're like, it's takes a lot more work, a lot more time and energy. And, you know, you, um, but you learn those lessons and it wasn't terribly disappointing. It was just, all right, this is the reality. This is what you need to do. And, and, you know, we're, you know, a hundred percent invested in this. Right. his adventure. So yeah, it worked out. It worked out great. Um, so that like the time, like I think whatever you set out to do, you think you have an idea of how much time you need to do or accomplish your It takes way longer. So my goals have changed a couple of times over in the past, you know, six or eight months here. And yeah, it's fine, but it's, um, But I'm still driven to grow it and make it a huge impact in That's cool. I've learned so many different lessons that I... I guess to recap what you're saying, so you expected things not to take nearly as long as they do to get results and to get traction, but And even marketing, like it's... Why do you think that is? Well, I, I know there is data out there to that shows that if a person to react or respond to something that's out there that. they may want or a service or product that you have. It's not always that first glimpse Oh yeah. You have to be exposed to something seven Multiple times. So with marketing, it's one of those hard things that you either put work into or you pay for that doesn't always net you a revenue right off the bat. So it can be a, You have to study and pay Sure, that makes sense. Well, in the junk world, the dumpster world and the waste world, people see your cans or your dumpsters and if they see that enough times, they'll eventually call you when they have a need. They'll say, oh yeah, I see that blue can or I see that orange can, whatever color it is. The junk removal guys, it's harder because if you have one truck, how many people are going to see that truck? But I don't know if you've seen the bright ones. I see them all the time. There's this one company that is local that has a bright red truck with a sprinter on it. I don't remember the name of it, but I remember, yeah, they must be fast junk removal people because they have a bright red truck. It looks clean. It's noticeable. So if you're doing a physical service, it's a lot easier to be seen in the community. But if you're doing a virtual service or coaching or something more white collar, I'll say, how do In that world, I think it's like the Instagram, it's the LinkedIn. So I spent a lot of time on trying to perfect or do well in the LinkedIn space. And my next venture is really to try to explore the Instagram and the TikTok to see what I can develop and what I can attract. which may be more impactful, I don't know yet. LinkedIn has netted some results and it doesn't cost much. It's just, it's time and effort that Yeah, your clientele are probably on LinkedIn. The people I wanna connect with are on Facebook and Instagram primarily. I'm sure everyone's on TikTok. So it doesn't hurt to post everywhere. Well, one of the things I learned I learned a lot of things since I became a business owner. But one of the expectations that I had was that my family members would be excited about what I'm doing and they would want to join me because it was exciting. Because for me, it's an adventure. I get to do cool things, working on trucks, driving my world, driving on a beach. That was really fun. And I thought people would want to join me. My dad did. He loved it. He liked being with me, helping me with stuff, welding, painting cans. But no one else in my family cared at all. My brother would come and help if there was an emergency. I shouldn't say they didn't care at all. They just had their own lives, their own things to be worried about, which makes sense. Looking back, I'm not excited about what they're excited about. I want to know what they're doing and I care about their success. I don't actually know how to help them with their success. And it is amazing when people do engage and say, hey, I want to help you. And you're like, yeah, you finally have someone that's interested in helping, actually helping, not just knowing about it. The amount of information they don't know, and you have to get them up to speed about what you're doing, and how they're so far away from being able to help. For example, if someone wanted to jump onto a truck with me and assist, there's so many things I have to teach them that they just don't know. They basically be standing there and they might, it's actually dangerous because they might do something where they might get themselves killed. Right. They're standing in the wrong place or touch the wrong thing. Or, um, they just don't know the flow of traffic, like at the landfill. So to get them from the point where they can, that they're, they're at right now to actually being able to assist is not that simple. So I realized I really was on an island. And as the owner, you have to learn everything. And that's the part that, when you're an employee, you just don't realize, because you know your stuff really well, but everything has to work for that company to run, everything. And as the owner, you gotta make sure you know enough about every piece to push it forward. And as an employee, you just don't, because someone else will handle it. But not as the owner. no matter what Yeah, and I think smaller, it's harder. You have less people to help you get the Right, and you don't have as much, when you're small, you don't have as many resources to attract talented people. And at the higher levels, it's a talent game. The most talented people go to follow bigger paychecks typically. But if you're a mission-oriented company, Like you're not doing it just to make money, you're doing it to create a healthy culture, help your community. That does attract different types of people. And hopefully that's the type of people you want. That's what I want. No, you're exactly right. So we talked about your belief. I think, didn't you, you told us, did No, I mean, when you showed me this, I, what kept popping in my mind was I was, Prior to doing this, I was a nurse home administrator. And in that role, what was interesting is it was in a time where, like it is now, where you have cell phones and all kinds of distractions that you have to contend with. Yeah, getting worse, right? And getting worse. And you're contending in a space that's supposed to feel at home for you know, people that are elderly and infirm that need our help, you know, and it's not help just physically, it's also, you Yeah, of course. Yeah, I can imagine when I'm an If I ever go to a nursing home, I want it to be fun. I It's one of the things that gets in the way is they use the cell phones by Yeah, so MIT knew that, the whole building knew it. It was something we really impressed upon because we want people to be focused on the care. And there's some issues with HIPAA and things like that that could happen the ability that you have in these phones, whether it's voice recording, video, pictures, things like that. You just don't want to have that. That's true. You don't want to see anything incidentally being recorded or shown. or posting on Facebook But- Yeah, I can just imagine that. Look at this video of this old person falling down, and then you got lawsuits like So I would do my rounds. I always, I don't know if you've heard the term MBWA. MBWA, no. Meeby Weeby? No. No. MBWA. Manage by It was always an important thing that I had learned early on, which was you always made a point to make yourself, you know, walk through the building, you know, talk to folks, whether you're not only just residents, but staff and, you know, and just be present. And when doing that, you know, with the cell phones, we had a strict rule is, you know, three strikes Oh, if you were caught on your cell phone, I mean, there'd be a conversation and. Yeah, we document that, but we really wanted to have a zero tolerance policy. Well, yeah, that makes sense. So I was up on the second form. We had surgeries. We had a, it was during lunch and it was during the summer and I'm walking through and you're talking to residents stuff and I, and there's a dietary aid that is passing out ice cream. And I'm hearing this. You have the music that you hear from the So I hear it playing. I'm like, oh, that's kind of neat. Where's that coming from? The happy jingle, happy jingle. Yeah. Nobody would tell me and I'm looking around like, no, where is it? The manager's like, and I forget the kid's name. He's like, I think one of the high schoolers. She said, he's got his phone. He was scared to I guess the lesson there is, I commended him for doing that. It was a really great, innovative, creative idea. He knew the rules because he didn't want to come out and say, hey. He definitely knew the rules. Yeah. Right. But I couldn't be mad at him. I'm like, this was a great idea. Why don't we do this together? Preferably not with your phone now, but let's find the audio to make that happen. Lesson learned. It was a belief I had. I had changed my mind on slightly. Still, we had to have a strict policy, but what was really interesting is you, it's hard, it's always easy to react to things, right? And I think that's the important piece. We may have policies and procedures and there might be things that are very black and white, but sometimes there's lessons learned on. a person's perspective, his heart was Yeah, well, clearly he was using it for work purposes, not for personal purposes, which is, I imagine the spirit of that rule. We don't want you doing personal stuff when you should be working. You're here to help the clients, help the residents. And instead, you're distracted on your phone. Why are we paying you to watch Netflix? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And if you have to make a rule that you can't be on your phone during work hours, probably just need to get rid of the people. Unfortunately, that shouldn't have to That's why there was such a short leash on it because it was And there's stories I could share, I won't share live, but there's things that you find people do that really harden you. You get very jaded on why, like coming to that role wasn't because I want to be a mean, terrible person. There was, there was things that had happened in the facility in my past. And like, I, I don't want to see this We are. We have that problem. So we have that problem with trucking in cell phones in the truck. And we're really torn Very dangerous. Yeah. For a lot of reasons, because you're not just a driver. You're an operator. Right. And not even obviously you shouldn't be looking at it while you drive. Right. I shouldn't have to say that, but I do. Don't look at your phone while you're driving. But also talking while driving is very distracting. And I know people that have done stupid things, cause they were paying attention to Actually what they're doing. Now, if you're driving straight down the road, not a big deal. I don't think it's a big deal to talk, but you need to make sure that you're good enough to keep a good distance. You have to have good habits. You're paying attention. Cause if you're driving, you know, 30 tons down the road and you have to stop suddenly, you're talking about an accident probably. So I always have a headset. And if I get to a job site, it's all right, I gotta go, because I'm about to operate this dumpster and I need my full brain. It's so easy to just pull the lever and not realize that there's like an overhead wire Right. And there's a lot of tools now that I don't know if I'm sure insurance costs are pretty expensive, things like that. And there's probably incentive to put cameras and things like that in the cab. But I mean, it comes with a price too. Like I see the reels or the TikToks of folks that have these terrible accents in these trucks because the driver was Those are terrifying. And that happens a lot with over-the-road trucking, OTR, because they have to drive across the country and they go to sleep deprivation to get their hauls done. So the cameras in the truck is an interesting conversation. So the big companies, we're talking about this at Waste Expo, they absolutely all require trucks to have cameras, not just facing out, which is what I like, I want to see what's happening in the road, but facing in towards the driver. And I understand why they want to do that. It's because they can systematize it. And cameras are really smart. They, they put boxes around what you're doing. So if your hands come up, they'll put a box around your hand and say, what are you doing with your hands? Hey, it looks like you're distracted because you're using something in your hand while you should be driving. Now, in theory, that's a great idea. But if you just put yourself in the driver's perspective, like you're going to babysit me on that work. And if you have a good driver, they'll get very jaded by that. They no longer have privacy. And they're used to having privacy inside that cab. So the big companies don't care. Like FedEx is another good example. They don't care. They want a camera on you. If your camera doesn't work, you're not driving. And if we can't get your camera to work because you're disabling it, which happens, they'll put something on the camera. They'll disconnect it, then you're just terminated. So that's big corporate. So if you can build enough trust with your team to not have cameras, then you can get skilled people, When you have so much volume like FedEx or UPS, where they do that, I can see as an owner or as a leader, yeah, I want Legally experience, you know, terrible things that might've happened, but in a small operation I can, yeah, even me personally, if I was a driver, I, yeah, I would be taken back and invasion of privacy I would see, but then as an owner, you know, It's the challenges, you know, how well are you vetting and how well can you mitigate the risk on how you interview folks and bring on those right, So I've heard, I've seen a good policy where you have a camera that faces in for the first year. If you have a great record after a year, then the internal camera gets turned off. In that instance, you have a safeguard for an unknown driver and they have an opportunity to build enough trust where they get that turned off. I like that approach because I don't want to babysit the drivers. The only time I ever look at a camera is if something happened. Case in point, we had a driver that came back and he had damage on front of his truck. And we're like, what happened? And the driver said, oh, I'm not really sure. And then we're like, well, well, you drove it. I guess we're gonna have to look at the camera if you don't know. And the camera is so smart. It records everything. for so long and you can go back and watch the whole thing. But it also knows when something disruptive happens. So we very easily said, hey, here's a time during his day where there was a big bump, like something happened, he hit something. So we went right to that video and he ran over a bunch of rocks. There's like rocks in the road. He just ran over him and the camera's facing in. He just going like this, just ran over it, you know, and that's what it was. And then when we told him, hey, we saw you ran over a bunch of rocks. It's like, oh, yeah, there was there was a bunch of rocks in the road. Yeah. Yep. I remember that. Like he knew what happened, but he definitely knew what happened because as soon as we talked to him about the video, he he 100 percent remember where it was. He knew exactly what had happened, but he wasn't going to admit that. Yeah. We had to call him out on it. And he was hoping that we would just shrug it off. So then you have decided we're going to do about that scenario. How do you discipline that person? The company I was at, this wasn't my company. I was just the CFO there. The rule was, if you damage a truck, you pay for it. So it was like two grand worth of damage. I don't know if he paid for the whole thing, but he had to have money taken out of his paycheck. And if the guy has opportunities, he's gonna bounce. It's another way of firing somebody indirectly. Either you get your money back for the truck, or you lose the bad employee. And so a lot of people solve that problem differently. In that case, he definitely didn't build enough trust. I think nobody in that company had the cameras turned off from the inside. I have a lot of stories. That's just one that, oh man. Just so hard to work with these. Some of these guys just at a high level, when you've got 50 trucks on the road, you just have to just have policies. If you have five guys, you can have a deeper personal relationship with them and you'll get further along Yeah, and there's becomes a mutual respect that you see or get from that and that's earned. I like who I'm working for. Yeah, I'm gonna take better care of the equipment in And you have to weigh how expensive is it to deal with this recurring? How do you have a repeatable solution? Well, there's some stuff selfishly I want to talk about when it comes to stuff I care about. And we were talking about this before. You see a lot of business owners. I see a lot of business owners and they make a lot of mistakes. I have my own answer to this question, so I'll start. But what's a mistake that you see business owners make over and over and When I talk with clients or business owners, it's always, in most cases, obvious to them that And that there's a couple of things that cause that. I mean, there's just, there's a lack of understanding of their finances and the accuracy, right? Yeah. Cash in cash out living, you know, between, you know, getting paid and not paid and, you know, really trying to, and not knowing at the end of the year, like, Did you make any money or not? What's the net income? Like you've been paying yourself here and there over the year and you've been paying for these expenses, but really don't have an idea of what that is. And it's an important piece of running a business. Like you should know how much money you're making so that you can appropriately plan. You may be doing well covering the expenses of the operation, but what are we doing build up that account for that bad year or that bad event that may occur. And what about your staff? And what about developing your retirement, your 401k, things like that? It diminishes the value of the company for one. And the stress level is so much more immense. You're really leaving it to luck of whether this is gonna be a good year or whether I can do this, buy Yeah, you're being reactive instead of proactive is how I think of it. So I see that same thing. And because I have a financial background, that's always at the forefront of my mind. the cash flow is the blood of the business. Like it or hate it, that's the truth. You don't have cash, you just don't have resources. And you can try to do everything yourself, but you can't make it, you can't operate a truck, you can't buy a truck just on your gusto, your strength, you got to have cash. So looking at your finances once a year is something that people don't even do that. They barely put together enough information to do their taxes. Some of them, they unfortunately don't even do their taxes. And the government has to tell them, hey, you owe us lots of money. But the more often that you look at your finances, the better decisions you're going to make. And most people run their business out of their bank account. Most smaller businesses run their business out of their bank account. And as long as they have cash, they feel good. So if they have 50 grand in cash, they think that's great. So I have metrics now that I use. And for cash reserves, I think a small business should have two months worth of expenses in reserve. So let's just say your expenses for an average month Maybe you should say your highest month if you want to really get it right. Let's say your highest month is 30 grand of expenses. You should have $60,000 in cash reserves at all times. And your line of credit paid all the way down. That's healthy. And if you don't have that, when hard times come, because they will come, they will find you, then you're going to have to borrow or do something drastic, which is going to be detrimental to your future and your business's future. So that's my reserve. I didn't have that when I first started. I had my line of credit and I immediately tapped into it to buy a truck. I was like, I want to have another truck. And part of that's because I just didn't plan ahead and I had big goals and I needed to I needed to grow the business quick enough so I could pay myself what I was used to getting paid. But that was a mistake and I paid more interest because of that. I made those mistakes. So that's a big part of it. And another thing is with your finances, if you don't have your finances figured out, then you don't know what your business is worth. And I think that's important because you don't have a job. unless you want a job, I guess people could want a job. You wanna have a business that actually has value. And I No, and what's funny in that cashflow issue, like working with one particular client, I mean, how does he know what to charge for a service? Oh, right. You know what I mean? Like you rely, He relies on what the market in his area does for charging for services, and that's usually a broad range. There's a low end and there's a high end. He tries to be in the middle. is that really profitable for you? Is that really, like, there should be a more concrete calculation on how you get to that number, not, yeah, I feel, it's not a feeling. And so that's another component of that, like, you don't even know if you're charging Yeah. Well, most business owners couldn't tell you how much their profit was last month. Maybe they can't even tell you their revenue for last month. They probably can say how many hauls they did or how many cans are deployed, which is a good starting point. And yes, you do want that leading indicator. Yeah. If I deploy a container, or if I do more work, I'm going to So that's a big problem, but it's not because that person's a terrible business owner. It is because they're overseeing the entire operation and it is not the most important critical thing. They're worried about paying their staff, paying their vendors, providing a service for clients. And those things, ideally, yes, they should come first before you're looking at your financials. but it just, it doesn't happen at the end. So I think, you know, one of the things to this person in particular, I actually encouraged him to, he doesn't live in Raleigh, he's up in Buffalo. So I said, go to it, you need to find an accountant to help you with your books. And, you know, that stuff can be done for you. And it's really, it's an easy, analysis to look at that at least monthly to understand what's coming. At least monthly, yeah. I think that the frequency at which you look at something, you measure something is directly correlated to how it's going to improve. So if you look at it once a year, if you look at your finances once a year, how many decisions are you going to make that are good decisions? If you look at it once a quarter, it's a little bit better. You'll make a few more better decisions. Look at it once a month, it's okay. Weekly, I think is really a minimum, but I look at my finances every day, every single day. And I'd use that in my personal life for my weight. If I weighed myself once a year, to bring it to something everyone can relate to, my decisions about what I'm gonna do with my body, exercise and eating, if I look at my weight once a year, I'm not gonna make good decisions because I'll say, oh, I have a whole year, I have six months again to make good decisions so that scale tells me the right thing. But if I look at it every quarter, I'm gonna make better decisions. If I look at every month, I'm gonna make better decisions. every week, at least I'm going to say, hey, I can't, you know, it's Tuesday. I'm going to weigh myself on Friday. But still, if I only look at my weight once a week, I'm still going to have cheat days or I might slack off on Tuesday. So this morning I weighed myself And because I weighed myself this morning and I knew I was going to weigh myself, I wanted that scale to say good things. So yesterday I didn't eat like a crazy person. I ate well, but I didn't eat a lot of sugar. I'm not putting creamer in my coffee because I want that scale to say good things tomorrow. And I know that's going to happen. you know, on Friday and Saturday, every single day. So the same thing should be true for your finances. You should absolutely know where your cash comes from and goes to every single day. And that's hard for people to keep up with if they're on their own. So I have a team member that provides that information to me. And obviously it's confidential because I don't want to freak anyone out and helps with forecasting. So yeah, you need to look at what do you look at every So do you have tools for business owners that Well, we've developed our own because QuickBooks is a great database to hold information and it does produce reports, but it doesn't produce the reports I want. So I've worked with my team member and we've developed our own cashflow, daily cashflow. And we have other metrics too that are timed based on when we get information, like I also look at productivity compared to payroll paid out. So I know we only can look at that when we pay payroll. So ours is every two weeks. So we have a daily cash flow, and then we have a payroll analysis we do every two weeks. And that tells us how productive our team members are being. I don't show that to them, but I have a grading system as to who's doing the best per dollar and who's doing the worst per dollar. And I have to treat those things very differently so we can make money. On a monthly basis is when you can look at full financial statements and you should definitely look at it full financial statements. And most financial statements that I've seen come to us that we had to fix are not legible. I shouldn't say not legible, you can't make decisions based on them. Like the stuff I like to break out is labor, direct labor needs to be its own thing because that is what you can absolutely control the most of. You can't really control a lot of your vendor costs. There's limited control. Yes, you want to know what that is, but you're not going to change how much you pay to a landfill every day. But you can absolutely change how much you spend on labor every day by scheduling, focus on productivity, which I focus on productivity. And I've been talking about this recently, the efficiency of your labor. You want to know exactly how many dollars you have to pay employees to generate that revenue, or really not even the revenue, the part that you add value to if you're a customer. And so two to three is my number right now. For most people, it depends on your business. And you want to track that number. If you spend $2, sorry, if you spend $1 on labor, direct labor, it'd be healthy for that to generate $2 of revenue, to keep it simple, in simple terms. And if that falls below two, you spend... Am I saying that right? Let me back it up. Because the ratio is revenue divided by labor. So yeah, you really want it to be three. So if I spend $1 in labor and generates $3 of revenue, that's even better. So if that number, if I spend a dollar on labor and it generates $1 revenue, I'm screwed. I'm not gonna make any money that way. So you have to constantly make sure that's a healthy ratio. And I think a lot of, again, going back to that cash flow example, I think that's an important, statistic for the business owner to know. So when they're billing out or setting a quote out for a project, they're understanding, hey, I know it's going to take this much in labor times three. Oh, it's going to be this much because that's what the market does. And you soon find out like, how far off you are, because you might be charging too much. And maybe the issue is not the ratio you're trying to calculate, maybe it's how Right, yeah, and that's what you have the most control over, is And then related to that is, gosh, what was I gonna say? On the financial side of things, Nah, But another thing that I'll track, and I like bringing this up, I'm gonna try to bring it up more often is profit, but profit in a way that is real. So a lot of owners won't pay themselves. So when you're looking at direct labor, you're an owner and you're in your business, you actually are a direct labor for a portion of your time. I'm sure you do other things that are not direct labor, which is overhead. If you don't factor in how much you're contributing to your business directly, that ratio I just talked about is gonna be off and you won't be able to properly evaluate how much profit you're making. So if I, let's just say I could hire someone for 50 grand to do work that I'm doing, but I'm doing instead. Yeah, I might be saving $50,000 of salary, but am I actually running a healthy business? I don't know. So, it's important to either pay yourself a real salary or factor that into your calculations, factor that into your financial statements to say, yeah, if I paid someone, it would cost me $50,000 for them to do this work. Now, I like getting in the truck and driving, but when I do that, it's paying me like $20, $25 an hour. versus I should be doing higher level work where I should be making, like that would cost $50 per hour, like marketing or sales, those are higher level skills. So you need to factor that in to see, hey, are we making money? And it helps you make good decisions. If you want to be in the truck, that's one thing. But make sure your finances show that correctly. And then when you get down to your profit line, you want that to be a real number. And so EBITDA is something that you're familiar with. Probably people aren't familiar with it. Not everyone's familiar with that. Just a fancy way to say profit without debt If I remember correctly, it's earnings before. Taxes, interest, Right, yeah. And depreciation and amortization are basically the same thing, just different assets. Taxes, us, we're small businesses. That doesn't get paid by the business typically. There's nuances with different states. So it's really interest and depreciation that you want to add back to your profit. You want to make sure your profit includes how much you pay yourself as well to get a real number. So I think it's very important to know what my business is worth, and EBITDA is the way that the industry calculates that. So let's use, I'll use the simple example I've used before. If I have a profit in EBITDA of a million dollars, I should be able to roughly, there's other factors, but roughly calculate how much that businesses work. And let's say it's a true EBITDA, I've added back my salary. I've taken things out of that where I was just, I was spending money that I wouldn't spend normally. I was just doing it as a business owner, like maybe buying an extra car through the business that isn't required and like a new owner wouldn't buy that. So let's say I got true profit of a million dollars and I have a junk removal business. So junk removal, you have to go get pretty much, most junk removal companies have to go find their customer every single time. So the revenue is not as predictable. So if I made a million dollars profit this year, it's hard for me to say, I'm gonna make a million dollars next year because I have to go get a new customer for every job. Now, if you have recurring revenue that changes it, but let's just assume the standard situation is I'm using ads to go find clients, customers, and it's a new customer every time. So that's going to be a one to two times EBITDA multiplier. So it's going to be, my company is going to be worth one to $2 million in that scenario. If I have a dumpster rental business, which has got, customers, in my case, contractors, that are gonna be using me consistently. It's gonna be different jobs. My dumpster's gonna be moving all over town, but I'm probably gonna be re-renting it out to the same customers. In our case, we had 400 customers, and most of them were repeat customers. They always have a container, because they're always working, and they always need one. So, it's just, it's recurring, but not as sticky, because they could decide, hey, for this next job, I'm gonna use somebody else. So it's recurring, but not really not solid. So that would be a three to four multiplier. So a million dollar profit multiplied by three, you got a $3 million, maybe a $4 million company at that level. If you've got even more recurring revenue, which is either subscription-based or contract-based, that increased the multiplier more. And that's where your waste collection comes in. So residential trash, you know, we've all got, we should, at this point, we should all have trash cans outside our house. Truck comes around and picks that up once a week and empties it. You know, you pay them a subscription or you have a, or the town has a contract. So that's, that's very solid revenue. And so that'll get you a five to six multiplier. So a waste collection business could have a million dollars of profit, that'll be a $5 million company or a $6 million company. So it's way more attractive. It's really interesting. Yeah. And then if you have a front load, we didn't talk about this one, which is commercial trash. Those are, those are pretty much always contracts. The big companies get contracts and that's very, very hard to get into. And so that might even be higher than six. That might be a seven or eight multiplier. Yes. Now each level that I just should go this way, each level that I just described, they're harder to build as you go up. Junk removal, you can jump in that tomorrow. I got a truck, I can haul junk tomorrow. Dumpsters, gotta buy a lot of equipment. Waste collection, you're gonna lose money for a long time. Because you have to have all the infrastructure as you build those routes. And then same thing for commercial, you gotta get the equipment and those trucks cost more than 300 grand just for a truck. And if you buy a cheap one, you got to fix it up. It's going to cost you a hundred grand to fix it up. Those So there's a quick, hopefully that's quick, understanding evaluation. And someday you're going to want to sell your business, whether you're in the waste hauling business world or anything, you should, you should be building an asset. And ironically, the more valuable a business is, like more attractive to a buyer, those businesses are more fun to own because you're not And I think the nice correlation that discussion is when we go back to cashflow, the better you understand it and the better you manage it. So you talked about like subscription and that's the strategy I try to really encourage business owners to use because it's guaranteed money every month, every week, however it's done, whether you're really in almost in any industry. And we're a society that will subscribe to anything. you know, financially, I try not to personally. People do it and find it easy. They don't want to, you know, for example, you know, where we live, we have lawn care and, you know, we have snow removal. My thought, you know, for a landscaping company that does both, I would jump to a subscription. Hey, take care of your property, no matter whether you got snow on the lawn or you got grass that needs to get cut. And take care of your cleanup and all this, and it's guaranteed monthly revenue. And you don't have that gap in cashflow between fall or in the spring and Yes. Well, in that scenario, it's good for both the customer and the vendor, the company and the whoever's getting that service, because from a service perspective, I do not want to get nickels and dimed. I want to get an invoice that has different line items because they came through and they had a tree branch removed and I add that to my expense. I'd much rather have it just, yep, you're gonna take care of this problem. Because I'm paying for the solution. I don't want you to go through and count every little thing you did for me. Because that's Right. And when you look at that model, especially, and this is great free advice if you have a landscaping and snow removal business up. Or if you have a very tight timeframe where you're doing snow removal and a client is paying you know, a premium to make sure that snow gets removed. High dollar amount. And then during the summer, you know, spring, you're paying that dollar amount to get the lawn cut so many times. And so you're, for the homeowner, the expenses are when it's really nice outside or when it's really crummy outside. And your spring and fall, you're not spending that much money on it. But when you take a look and you understand your cashflow and what you're charging, and you look at that accumulated amount and you divide that by 12, it's a lot less. It's like a balanced billing for your outdoor lawn property care. I know like some of the, what is it? One of the gas companies locally does that. They do balanced billing. So then you're Gas is much higher in the winter because you're using a lot to heat your home versus in the summer, it's almost nothing. And if it's too high in the winter, people do the balance billing. So they pay a calculated average amount Oh, wow. Yeah. So well, that's good for everybody. Yeah. So I like it. I never paid for snow removal in New York. I I did have my own snowplow and that thing was huge. I was actually worried that one of my children would get eaten by it. It was so gigantic. It's like if my five year old runs in front of this thing, they're going to die. You know, you got to have a solution for Yeah. Yeah. And I had it was fun. I had a plow for a couple of years. It was You know, for me personally, but I had a guy who had a small lawn company. I helped him out once or twice, actually clearing a lot for one of the lots at the stadium for the Buffalo Bills game. Yeah. Well, I think we should wrap up. Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we, well, maybe looking So next, you know, we're starting up a virtual group coming up in August. It'll be Thursday mornings from eight to 11. It's once a month. The first, actually the first meeting is free and they are monthly meetings. There's a lot of growth, a lot of things that happen for members that attend. Yeah. And then back in Buffalo, we have an active group right now. So we're growing that group. That's an in-person group. That's an in-person group. And so, yeah, if you have interest, if you're up in the New York, Buffalo, Rochester area, look at in-person groups up there while we'll still look to grow that virtual group that we got coming up in August. I think you'll be Yes. Yeah, I'll be there. Yeah, exactly. Looking forward to it. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, Tom. Thanks for talking to me. It's been fun. Thanks for having me. And we'll have to do this again sometime. Sounds good. All right. Thanks, Mike. Thank you for joining us for Waste to Wealth. This has been Michael McCall and my guest, Tom DiJohn today. We hope that you keep thriving. God Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Waste to Wealth. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you connect with us on social media and subscribe to the show wherever you consume podcasts. 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