From Employee to Business Owner in 32 Days with Nick Molfino
Building a company requires more than a good idea — it takes the right decisions, the right people, and a clear understanding of what you’re building toward.
In this episode of The Breakout Moment, Christina May sits down with Nick Molfino, President & CEO of L2 Construction, to discuss the experience of launching a construction startup in just 32 days, the values that shape a company’s culture, and the responsibility leaders have to prepare for the future.
Nick shares his perspective on entrepreneurship, opportunity, accountability, and the importance of building a business that cares for the people who depend on it.
Nick Molfino: Our origin story in of itself I think is a great breakout. I mean, I went from employed for almost 12 years to unemployed and a business owner and 32 days because an owner was willing to give us work.
Christina May: Okay that's very cool. So that's helpful.
NM: Happy to tell that story. It's actually a really awesome story. And then I think I mentioned in the prep, you know, three years ago, my partner retired. And so now at 11 years in business, I'm almost like a new startup again because I have sole control and did a three, five-year, ten-year plan, you know, really kind of jumping in some of that stuff. And in 23, my partner retired almost suddenly a year ahead of schedule.
CM: Okay.
NM: So I was not fully prepared for that, but it was kind of cool because it was like, hey, I can ramp up right now.
CM: Right.
NM: It’s not a partnership. It's not 50/50.
I can rethink this.
NM: Right. So through his last year there, we had met Kathy Hum. She's an ABC board member.
CM: Yep.
NM: So met Kathy. Which, again, my whole life story. Serendipity and luck. It's based on hard-working relationships, and our core values kind of tie in and all that. The company's core values are my values. So, you know, again, not to oversimplify things, but I was an estimator and project manager for a company that did health care and construction. Another random segue breakout moment: I went to College for International Affairs, was going to go work for three-letter agencies, was in Sarajevo, Bosnia, for internships in ‘96, right at the end of the war. Saw some amazing things. Also figured out that I was not going to work for the government.
CM: Right.
NM: Had a buddy who went to do citing, hail damage, and legal insurance fraud in Chicago. Went up there for a year, just because I didn’t want to come home and sign a lease. I didn’t want to come back to Northern Virginia. I was born and raised in Falls Church. I knew the trap. I knew if I came over, signed a lease, I would just be on the hamster wheel.
CM: Yep.
NM: I always had an idea that I had potential. There was some path I didn't know what it was, I was chasing it. Went to Chicago for a year. The first three months. Brought my college roommate up. He went back home, made a bunch of money, told his dad about the whole experience. I came home expecting to go to grad school. I found out that you actually have to pay business taxes at the federal level and the state level.
CM: Yes.
NM: In both states. So as a Virginia resident and you have to pay personal tax.
CM: Yes you do.
NM: So I paid some of those. I didn't pay all of those. And then when I went to do my taxes, the CPA was like, you got a couple other bills to pay. And so my grad school money vanished, went to talk to my college roommates dad, who owned Twin Contracting at the time and said, look, you've got the soft skills, you've got the clearance. Let me teach you construction, teach, you project management. If you like it, stick around if you don't go away. So I literally, without any forethought or knowledge of occupied health care and government contracting, ended up at Twin. Fast track was APM running work PM my mentor great guy got cancer, unexpectedly passed away. So at 26 years old I get handed the Inova health care account.
CM: So no pressure, right?
NM: Yeah. So that wraps up, fast forward to 2015. There's a second generation of owners at Twin who would run the company for about ten years. Things didn't work out, we’ll leave it at that. They went bankrupt, Inova reached out to me and said, hey, wherever you land, keep your team and we'll give you all this work. And so I went from about to be unemployed and just built the house a year before my wife's been home with the kids, not really sure how we're going to make ends meet. To going, you know, I don't want to go work for somebody else, I don't want to start over and do the climbing the chain. Right. And, all the big guys, I had tons of respect for the DPR’s and the Hitt’s and the Clarke’s. I mean, they're amazing outfits, but they're not me,
CM: Right
NM: And going to an organization that size as the new guy fighting for client share, I just knew that wasn't it. And, when Inova approached me, Mark. Eric, huge person I want to shout out. There's a logic. I'm going to tie this all back together.
CM: Yeah, yeah.
NM: All these people, that I owe a debt of gratitude to. Mark Eric, who used to run IDC, brilliant man. We had operating rooms under construction. I don't know how much money those rooms produce in revenue. But he knew twin was not bonded. They would have had months long and who knows how much cost in getting another GC involved to scrub the job, figure out what's going on, re-contract it and started up, he knew that we had the right team because I've been doing work for them for years. And basically he said, hey, wherever you land, take the work with you with the intention being that we would land at another GC, and the job would keep going. Crazy idea. Sitting on the tailgate of my pickup truck on my driveway with my now retired partner who was also my neighbor, three doors down, who when we started working together at twin 15-12 years prior, we had mutual friends and I said, hey, we should grab a beer. And he didn't even stop. He kept walking and said, I don't mix business with pleasure. Fast forward, we had houses three doors apart. Wives are best friend, his younger daughter, my older daughter, best friends. We're running a company. Crazy how life works out. So we're sitting on a tailgate drinking beers. And I was like, you know, neither of us wants to start over. Neither of us wants to go anywhere. What if?
CM: Okay.
NM: And the what if became, we need money, went out and did a quick cap raise, brought in a couple outside shareholders, family, friends.
CM: And you did the family round?
NM: Yeah. So we did a family round. And then we had actually two outside investors as well. That's a whole conversation process. I wish I knew what I knew now about that. We didn’t do it right.
Yeah.
NM: But it worked out.
CM: I don't think anybody does it right the first time.
NM: Not when you're desperate.
CM: Nope. And young. And you're just starting. You're literally building yourself a job at that point,
NM: Trying to survive.
CM: Yeah.
NM: At that point anything sounds good.
You have a family, a mortgage, you have stuff to do. You don't want to start all over again. Yeah. I feel you.
NM: We were very lucky because the folks that we brought in were amazing. I think the majority of their motivation was to see us succeed and to set up.
CM: That's good.
NM: And so that worked out really well. But literally conversation happened, went to Inova and said, what if? And they said, you have 32 days, make a decision. If in 32 days you were not somewhere, that can be assigned this contract, we don't have a conversation. So I am going to the ABC events and just doing industry stuff had met Dan West who's with Marshall McClellan. Shout out to them, had met Brian Pollack who is with Landing and Ryan. Oh, shout out to them. Called out quickly and said hey what if. I had a buddy on the cruise now with Truist, you know, reached out to him and said what if. And all three of them took me seriously and said we got you will set you up.
CM: Wow.
NM: In 32 days, we secured class A licenses, all of the special BLD designations, everything we needed had a banking program, had a line of credit, had a surety and then really shocking. More shout outs Bayion, Don, Josie and Backstrom. Mick Backstrom was running the company at the time. John Singleton is running it now. They both said, look, we'll give you a lot of credit. Six months, no invoices. Just get on your feet we want to see you guys be successful. And then fast forward to what I was talking about. You know, three years ago with the strategy, met Kathy by talking to my new neighbor who had worked at Hitt in HR, who knew somebody who had gotten a place at Rand, who knew Kathy who got me introduced to her.
CM: You're like Kevin Bacon.
NM: It's amazing. I tell everybody, luck, serendipity, you know, higher power, whatever your belief system is, there's a path and opportunity out there, and you really just got to keep your eyes open and make some good decisions.
CM: And just make a decision.
NM: Make the best decision with the information you have at the time and realize that, you know, if it doesn't work out, you're still moving forward.
CM: Yeah. I think so many people just get stuck on analysis paralysis of even, not just the getting going part, but even once they've gotten going. I think that analysis paralysis comes back and it bites you later because so many of us have kind of made it through the first couple of years. So talk to me a little bit about, you talked about this tailgate moment where you guys are just sitting there with beer on the back of the truck, it's the two of you, and you're figuring out, we're going to start this company, and you accomplish that in 30 some days.
NM: 32 days.
CM: That's amazing, by the way,
NM: Class A license, banking, bonding, funding, and health insurance for our four employees.
CM: That's crazy.
NM: Could do it again, couldn’t even explain to you how we did it.
CM: Because for those that even aren't in the construction industry, you don't understand how much. I mean, that's months of work that you crammed into days.
CM: It was relationships.
NM: It was. So I say luck. And I've had some great mentors. Another shout out through meeting Cathy, I met Peter Schwartz. Who’s a Vistage chair.
CM: Yep.
NM: Vistage, great organization. Peters amazing chair. Have a group of fellow leaders and peers. And I get hounded in the group because I'm always saying a little bit of imposter syndrome. You know, still hard to believe, with my childhood and just the history and, like, looking where I am now and, like, it's surreal sometimes. At the same time, the group, you know, in different instances helped me realize like as an estimator project manager, I always, I mean I did whatever it took to get the job done and it was done with a very specific. So my tests were simple is moral, legal, and ethical. Right. So a client would say hey I need you to do this job and I'll pay you whatever it is, but I need you to build me a wall. Little space, no big deal. You know, let's just get it done and get it over with. And on a business standpoint and a client standpoint, as a 25-26 year-old, you go, cool, do it. But for me there was that immediate. And it got me in trouble. It definitely got me in trouble. But I would say no. And I was like, hey, if I do this one thing right, this requires a permit. This is changing egress. This is a life safety issue.Yea it’s one little room, and it's one wall and a door. But what if? Right. And if I'm willing to compromise my values and standards here in a hospital where it's not clinical, it's not patient care. It's no big deal.
CM: Right.
NM: How do you not slide down that hill? Because if the motive is profit or if the motive is just customer satisfaction versus saying, hey, if my job is and really on our end for for occupied health care, I truly believe we're really more of a service company than a technical company. We collect the experts for paper GC, so we got to find the best demo, the best drywall, the best millwork, the best door frame, hardware suppliers, the best MEP team, and we create the highest probability of success where the client gets what they need within the parameters. Keep them out of the news, keep patient satisfaction scores high, safety, infection prevention, and then give the rest of the team the right amount of time and an opportunity to make money. Because at the end of the day, and I've got in trouble for saying this before.
CM: You're not going to get in trouble here.
NM: But health care is not for profit. That's a tax strategy, not a business model.
CM: Yes. Correct.
NM: We are for profit. Right. And so we deliver a service, you deliver a service. A lot of that philosophy I think gave me tremendous relationships with subs. And so when my previous employer was going bankrupt, we were able to work with them in a way, I think I think most companies got 80 or 90 cents on the dollar.
CM: Yeah.
NM: Out of the end of the bankruptcy proceedings. Right. Which is unheard of.
CM: Yeah.
NM: And then, we had a project going on at Loudon hospitals, two operating rooms, some endoscopy suites, probably about $6 million worth of work. We went in on Friday, October 30th, 2015, got our Cobra marching papers. My partner at the time had some t shirts made up, met us in the parking lot, my superintendent, who I'd been doing work with for that entire time, and probably 12 or 15 years we've been coworkers. He came over, the three guys on his team came over with us. And so we went in on Friday afternoon, got laid off, went back to work on Monday with all the same subcontractors, handshakes with knowing that Inova was going to sign the contract. And so I say it's luck. I say it's relationships. But, you know, I'm definitely going to put in there. There was a consistent history of running work in a fair and responsible manner, so that the client knew they were taking a slight risk, but the risk of hiring us as a new company was nothing.
CM: Was not the risk.
NM: Compared to bringing in an unknown player losing millions of dollars in revenue, delaying a project months. And so, you know, but I don't in any way like I did the things that needed to be there to have that trust and relationship factor. But I still had the benefit of an owner willing to take that chance, because it may not have been the best decision financially or time wise for the hospital, but it would have been a much lesser risk for him personally, for the hospital. So for the Inova Health system and that team to be willing to take that was amazing to me. The fact that, you know, these established, large mechanical, electrical, plumbing companies that can do business with anybody, there are 4 or 5 GC’s.
CM: Oh yeah.
NM: That are great. In the health care space. And so for them to take a chance on us, that 32-day window, you know, it was, I think, being able to pick up the phone and talking to Brian, who had relationships with some of these subcontractors and hearing like, no, this is this guy's serious.
CM: And the other half of it is showing up and doing what you say you're going to do.
NM: Honor your commitments.
CM: Honor your commitments. It's hard. These aren't hard rules. I think, you know.
NM: It's Common sense. Which is not common anymore.
CM: Which is not common anymore. Exactly. That's why we're saying it.
NM: But it is common sense.
CM: But it is common sense. You treat people. It's golden rule stuff. You treat people how you want to be.
NM: You know, treat people with respect.
CM: Show up.
NM: Focus on the details. I'm rattling off our core values.
CM: There you go.
NM: These are not unique. You know, awesome marketing, jazzy words.
CM: But they shouldn't be.
NM: These are true simple principles that if you do the things, our business is simple If you do the thing, moral, legal, ethical are seven core values, plans and specs. There's disputes, but they're not hard to get through. Put the paperwork on the table. My, bad we’ll eat it. You're bad, you’ll pay for it and we move right along.
CM: Yeah, it's when we kick off with clients and some people find it very awkward. But, you know, a lot of our clients are not local. Some are, which is great, which means we can meet in person, but a lot are not. And so when you've got the slide deck, because you're all on a video and we have a section in there where we talk about our three core values and what that means to us and what we expect in the relationship, because I make it very much about this has to be a good fit on both sides. So one of our key things is transparency. I can't do my job unless you give me everything and I will always give you based on that everything back good, bad and ugly. You're not paying me to be an expert just to be a yes person. Pay me to be an expert because I'm gonna tell you something you're not going to like.
NM:That you need to hear
CM: That you need to hear, and then it's your decision. I'm not gonna say I told you so out loud later, but I might say it in my head. But it's still your decision. It's that you're the business owner. I'm a business owner. I totally respect that. But I wouldn't be doing my job if I just sat here and told you what you wanted to hear. If I wanted to feed into that ego. And I think, you know, that throws people off in that call every time we do it, I see these looks like, wow, why are they talking about this stuff? And it's like, no, this is the stuff that breaks contracts, that we will run into trouble later if we're not accountable to each other both ways. If we don't send something to you on time, we weren't proactive to tell you ahead of time, and it changes the project schedule that's on us. But also, if we've been chasing you to give us something that we need to do the job to meet your deadline, that's on you, and we're going to push back and say, deadlines moved. And you'd be amazed, even though that's very construction industry, we work primarily in the built environment. We do some work outside the built environment in B2B but how many people, even though that's like a common thing like this, is a schedule. If you're delayed, I'm delayed. But they just kind of like, what? What do you mean?
NM: No Yeah. I have so much respect for anybody, in your industry. And you know what with the stuff that you guys do because you have that blend of strategic and creative and deliverable, but you don't have the luxury of a set of drawings.
CM: No!
NM: If I have a dispute, I look at the drawings and go, this is clearly on the front end. You clearly own it. The schedule clearly says it was due by this day.
CM: And you go, this is called a change order.
NM: And here's the contract. Oh, look, there's a clause specific to this.
CM: Yep.
NM: Take it now, even with that much clarity, we still have people that say, well, I feel, and I think my emotions and it's, you know, that's you go back to the check the ego at the the door.
CM: Yep. You just you have to do your best with it. You have to do your best with it. One last thing I want to touch on. You were mentioning that, you know, your partner decided to retire a little early. A year early and it forced you to kind of restart. I mean, I have always been just me. No partner. Which I will tell you, there's pros and cons to that coin.
NM: Absolutely
CM: Now you have the perspective of both. Looking back, how long has it been?
NM: So we've been in business. 11 years. He retired. We're in the third year.
CM: Third year. Okay, so that's long enough to have some good.
NM:End of 23 officially and he stuck around through the middle of the 24.
Yeah. That's long enough to have some good perspective.
NM:Yeah I've been through the wave.
CM: You’ve been through the initial wave.
NM: There’s the initial, Oh shit. And then there's a couple other oh shits. P
CM: Pick an oh shit moment that now you're like that. I wish I'd known that.
NM: So I'll give you two great ones. And one was something that I obsessed and worried about that ended up not being a big deal.
CM: Told you the things you worry about the most never happened.
NM: And one I didn't think about at all so wouldn't change a thing. When he and I started, he had the back of the house. He learned. So he was a PM estimator as well. He learned how to do the accounting side of things. Okay. I mean, this guy jumped in and learned payroll and insurance. So, I mean, all of those things that we needed to keep churning. And so I was able to really focus externally and build the brand, build the business, go out and run, work. I have to tell you the story just because I love it. So third year in business, we're doing great. We're on a bunch of Inova campuses. Design and construction comes to who's now my general superintendent. Again I have the most amazing team, most amazing employees. John Ellard, who he and I built a ton of stuff. We CM: worked together forever. He left Twin when when things were starting to kind of fall apart. He went to Turner. He came back with us.
CM: Okay.
NM: About a month, nine. Great chance. And he. I'm going to figure something out for him. He's got, like, a 7 to 10 year retirement. He's not an owner, but he's he's going to be treated like an owner. I mean, the guy built the business with with drew and I. So year three, we're doing a roof job at Fair Oaks. And Inova had just purchased the Exxon Mobil campus, 117 acres, 4 or 5 buildings, nine stories. And they're building a cancer center, proton therapy. I think it was Clark was doing that. But they had to renovate nine stories and turn half of the building into an I2 Institutional Hospital. So you have to have redundant sprinkler, redundant HVAC generators, and you're talking.
CM: Big
NM: oil money, office space, being turned to health care. So they reach out to John and say, hey, we want you to help with logistics. We need to look at the phasing. And before we put this out the bid, I want to make sure we got good logistics. So he calls me and says, hey, you know, wants me to look at logistics. What do you think? So whatever Inova wants. We wouldn't be a business without.
CM: Yeah.
NM: And, so he goes, has a conversation, comes back and goes why are we bidding this? I said, that's a good question. If they're asking us logistics, you know. So I reach out to to the head of designing construction and say, look, we're looking at logistics for you guys, talking about demoing nine stories, corn shell, bringing in the infrastructure of generators. And, the initial response was like, wow, you know, it's a little too big for you guys. And I sit back and I go, what do you mean to big? He goes, well, you know, it's probably going to be every bit of 12 to 15 million. It's a big job. And, you know, sitting back and on a phone call, and I said, are you in the office tomorrow. He goes Yeah, I say I want to talk about this, but I think it needs to be face to face. So I swing by, you know, this guy who was awesome, he would walk the parking garage to get the steps early in the morning. So if you went in right at about 7:00, 7:15, you’d grab him, grab a cup of coffee.
CM: Yeah.
NM: Right as he finished walking. So we sit down in the conference room and I looked at him and I said, you know, I'm just I respect whatever decision you make. I'm grateful for the opportunities we get. I know that there's plenty of pie for everybody, and you guys are doing your job and you're you're giving folks what they need your competitively bidding. The rest. But I really don't understand how, as a 32 day old entrepreneur class, A licensed general contractor, you trusted me with renovating two operating rooms adjacent to six occupied operating rooms adjacent to a fully occupied sterile processing department. But you don't trust me to do demolition in an empty building. I'm not questioning. I just want to understand how we can improve as a business.
That's great.
NM:What don't I have? What do I need to add to my skill set? My portfolio so that you would recognize me?
CM: That's amazing.
NM: And he looks at me and goes, It's a good point. If you can get banking and bonding put together. It was Monday or Tuesday, he goes, come back Thursday. If you can put banking and bonding together, and you pitch the team and they go for it, we'll let you guys bid the demo program. So I called Dan West up, Called Brian Pollack.
CM: Off you go. The phone start ringing.
NM: The same team that has done the things for us. You know reached out to to Bayion reached out to Backstrom. I said, what if you know would you guys if I can't get the bonding, the surety capacity on my own, would you guys bond? Or can we can we work together in some way to say, hey, I can't bond the full 15, but if I can get a bond on 8 or 9 of it and the MEP’s pick up bonds were covered and we're all using the same surety at that time. And so we go in Thursday, pitch the crap out of him. I just the team did amazing. You know. And again this is early small. We're five, six, seven people right. I don't have a marketing department. I don't have slides. I mean I didn’t even know what deck is.
CM: No, most don't anyway. It doesn't matter if you're five six or you're.
NM: It was rough. I can't remember the name of the program, but I found something on Microsoft and it like helped me create some things.
CM: Clippy, did clippy help you
NM: I don’t even remember what it was. But it made me look like a pro. And I look at it now, and I'm like, oh, this is awful.
CM: This is horrible.
NM: No story short. We pitch, we get the call. The next day. Problem. Okay. We'll work, will work through with you. What's the problem? Well, we need not just the corn shell. We need the build out. Done. They can't be separate projects. They need to overlap because we have to get the I2 designation so that once proton and the rest of the facility opens, it actually opens as a hospital.
CM: Right.
NM: So I said okay what does that mean. So well, we need to do the full program in about 14 months. I said okay, what does that mean. Because I need to know if you want to do it. And I said yes. What does that mean? And he says we're going to submit for sole Source. Then it'll be the largest contract at that time. Now it's a tiny number, but yeah, at the time it was a big source contract. The entire C-suite for Inova signed the sole source letter, and he sent it to me in the closing of his email was, well, I guess it's no longer L-who, and it's now L2. And so I printed that.
CM: I was gonna say, please tell me you printed that.
NM: It is a catchphrase, we use it in our all of our digital strategy, all of our marketing.
CM: I love that.
NM: The phrase is our goal is to not be L-who, its to be L2. And so that was an awesome story. I don't know how we got on that. Oh you're asking me about the two breakouts.
NM: So yeah. Sitting on the tailgate, getting the whole company up. I lost my train of thought completely.
CM: No, I was asking you. So taking it back to those three years ago, your partner retired. Now that you're three years in, which is a full cycle.
NM: Yep. Yep.
CM: Right. You're out of.
NM: The oh shits,
CM: Yeah, the oh shits, which the first one you said that you worried too much about that you shouldn't worried about at all.
NM: So accounting the, having a partner who is doing the books is great. I didn't look at financials for nine years, ten years.
CM: Can't do that when your just you.
NM: No well. Right. And when it's an employee versus corporate.
NM: I mean, we’re both on the hook for everything. So my fear and concern was, you know, how do you do that? How do you do it safely? How do you not get hosed? And I also had, you know, a little bit of trauma from hearing. I had, you know, a couple of subcontractors. One had employees, not paying sales tax, and siphoniong that money so the funds were stolen out of the company and the tax bill was due. Right. So you hear this thing that I'm not a county guy. I'm an estimator PM.
CM: That's about know what you know and know what you don't know. Right.
NM: And so, you know, we upgraded our banking program. Truist did a great job with us there. Using Kathy as our HR. You know, she's kind of our HR fractionally to our director. She's also helped me with the strategic side of things, but she helped us go out and screen and hire, my now senior, accounting person who's on path, you know, she wants to learn and grow. We're going to make her comptroller let her go. She's going to grow with the business.
NM: And she runs the crap out of the books. I mean, I was so worried for so long that the controls and security and having one person who's solely focused on that versus having a founder partner who's trying to do all the things, the quality of financials and accounting systems, the ingenuity, right, the ownership. It just it was my biggest fear. And I'm like, why do we do this day? Bingo. Somebody knew what they were doing day one. So that was you know, I obsessed and was so scared and just within weeks was like, thank you guys. This is the best thing ever. The one I didn't think about. And it struck me I was working on my private pilot's license, had so basically I was doing my last long distance solo. I made a bad call on weather and I'm now in the Shenandoah Valley. I'm at about 2800ft off the ground. I'm not moving. The headwind is so strong, that my speed indicator on the plane is 130 miles an hour. My ground speed is two miles an hour, and I'm getting tossed 4 or 5ft in either direction, up and down, sweating bullets. Fight my way back to Leesburg. Had like 4 or 5 landing attempts, almost hit a drone like it was one of those where like.
CM: I'm laughing only because I can relate in some ways.
NM: Couldn't get me out of the plane fast enough.
NM: And as I'm driving home and I'm kind of getting my wits about me and I'm just thinking about, like, made so many mistakes which should have never gone on that flight was rushing it. Once I knew the weather was coming, I should have stayed down in Shenandoah. But then all sudden, it hit me. I was like, what if I died? I have life insurance, right? I mean, wife would have gotten a little bit of money. Obviously, the other part of that, the aftermath like that would have been awful for them.
CM: But what about the rest
NM: But then i’m like, we personally guarantee the line. We personally guarantee the surety. Right. So and I've got 26 employees who count on me.
CM: And their families.
NM:Right. And their families and our subcontractors. Thousands. So I'm going I would have died and left my wife in a position that she's completely unprepared for.
CM: Right.
NM: And I left my team in a position that they're completely unprepared for.
CM: Right.
NM: And so through this stage, again, through the introduction from Kathy, met Wayne Zell, who's probably hands down one of the best attorneys for ownership, transition planning and all that stuff. And he came up with a really cost effective vehicle that basically set me up where we have an LLC that owns life insurance on me. That policy is a one way buy sell, it will take my ownership and pay my wife for it. And then I've got a separate policy that will infuse some operating capital under the company. And John Ellard, my general super who's again my right hand couldn't do this without him. He becomes owner of the company and he's got two options. Close it right. Get everybody a CM: good separation severance package because there's a couple million that drops in on top of we're fully capitalized right.
NM: So you have ample money to say okay we're not taking on any more work. Slowly phase the jobs.
CM: Phase it
NM: Close them correctly. Pay all the subcontractors. Give the customer what they needed and give folks three six month severance, whatever they need to make sure that basically if I die, I want it to be the happiest day in everyone's life.
CM: Right.
NM: That sounds really silly to say that.
CM: No, but it is.
NM: But as an owner in that responsibility. I will have met my responsibility to my family and my employees.
CM: That comes back to your core values.
NM: It does. And the other option is keep it.
CM: Yeah.
NM: Keep going. Right. And so my family's taken care of. My employees are taken care of. And that was one that, you know, when we were going through the transition and everything else never thought about because I always had a partner, I always had if something had happened to me, there's always somebody else that insurance would have kicked in and somebody would have picked up the pieces on the business side. Right. My wife and kids would have still have dealt with whatever they had to deal with, but the business was okay. And then all of a sudden it was like, well, the business is not okay. But then it was like it’s not just the business.
CM: Yeah
NM: Because my wife's name is tied to everything, and if I die and leave my employees unemployed, my subs not paid for my clients not serviced and my family in bankruptcy,
CM: That's not the legacy you want to leave.
NM: So fix that. And I haven't flown in about 18 months. Because Life insurance policy won’t let you fly for the first two years. But come November this year. Oh that's right.
CM: You'll get back in the saddle.
NM: But yeah that was, that was a huge one that you know, and it's, it's kind of creepy and weird to think about it, but that's a big one.
CM: It's not creepy. I think it's something that we don't talk enough about.
NM:I agree
CM: We've brought that up on the show, before, you know, just people not wanting to talk about it.
NM: Covey’s Seven Habits has a great chapter about it, and it starts with writing your own eulogy. I had done that from a perspective of professional legacy, and that side of it. But doing that planning and you know the entire thing.
CM: And you can always change it.
NM: Right.
CM: I think that's the other thing people think like people think, oh God, I got to get this right the first time. No you don't. You can always change it. Life changes. Having something is always better than having nothing.
NM: I agree. You know, it's funny. There's kind of a trifecta there. So that experience the going back to to Covey and I listen to that book probably every two years because there's always something new that comes out.
CM: It's added to that summer reading list.
NM: It's oh, it's it's phenomenal. And actually, Collins just came out with a new book as well as, like, What to Do With a life.
CM: Yes, I haven't gotten to that one yet.
NM: But the other piece of it, that hit was watching something, you know, I don't know where it came from, but somebody had a calendar and it basically talked about a number of summers. You have four kids go to college. Christmases. You have before they go to college.
CM: That's a very stoic value.
NM: That was another one that kind of made me think about and go, okay, I have these really ambitious goals for the company, but I also have a timeline
CM: Yes, you do.
NM: And that combination of recognizing the right Memento mori, we all have to die.
CM: Yep.
NM: Tomorrow's not promised.
CM: That's right.
NM: And then trying to balance that with an abundance mindset and making those decisions to say these are all great problems, this is all good. I just need to reset her back to why. And I'm doing this for the family. Me being at work 80 hours a week is not doing that for the family.
CM: That's right.
NM: And so you kind of cycle that all together. And it's kind of crazy because none of that was an issue. I was like, I need to get the licenses in my name, and I need to get the bank changed over, and who's going to do the books? And then you go, Holy crap, what if I died right now?
CM: It changes your perspective. And you're like one planning on that? So no, but that was a big one, I think that's a really great way to kind of close it out, as I say, you know, begin with the end in mind.
NM: Absolutely, absolutely.
