What happens when a lending company starts listening more closely to customer problems instead of staying in one lane? In this episode of The Breakout Moment, Christina sits down with Lacey Snyder of 4Bridges Enterprises to talk about expanding into structural steel, maritime, aviation, and other adjacent markets by following opportunity, building relationships, and staying adaptable through changing market conditions. The conversation explores sustainable growth, diversification, networking, and why some of the most resilient businesses are the ones nobody calls flashy.
Christina May: Well, welcome to The Breakout Moment.
Lacey Snyder: Thank you so much.
CM: I'm so excited to have you here today to share your story.
LS: It’s going to be fun.
CM: Yes, it is going to be fun. We've already had a lot of fun this morning off camera that nobody has seen, swapping stories. So I'm going to let you kind of lead in with, you know, you're just not your average lender. And I think when anybody thinks about what's the type of work that we do is, I talk about it a lot. It's like the beautiful, boring, right? The stuff that nobody really thinks about. They think, you know –
LS: Right. Unless you're in it, and it’s not really applicable.
CM: No. And people are like, "Oh, construction. Oh like B2B like what?" And so you have just a great story about how you've taken something that, you know, isn't what everybody thinks about as being exciting and has turned it into something really exciting.
LS: Yeah, well, we've always kind of been very innovative. I have an amazing business partner. He's brilliant, actually. Kevin Butler, some of you guys know who he is, but, you know, we started in the lending space, residential to commercial, added fleet, maritime, aviation eventually.
But, our big breakout, our big thing, we never saw coming was when a client needed a structural steel building, couldn't find it, couldn't find where to get it from. And we were like, okay, whatever you need, we'll figure it out. And then we were having some issues finding it.
CM: Oh, wow.
LS: So we ended up doing was doing the research, finding somewhere where we could wholesale from. There's plenty of dealers, but there's no wholesalers. We basically created a partnership. And now we can provide those building. So that is a wild way to go from lending to something else, because lending is boring, even if you have a ton of verticals, if you're not going through the process of purchasing an oil tanker or a commercial building, it is kind of boring.
And this just it really did give us a whole new life and excitement about our business just adding something in. We're still doing all those things. There's still great, we're still very successful, but this just added something so much more fun and different.
CM: Wow. And you know, that inspiration came from a customer. A customer need.
LS: Absolutely a customer. Absolutely. As does everything.
I think that with every good business, you have to be open minded. So if you if you hear something and you're like, wait a minute, I think I can do that, I can fill that need, I can figure that out. Adding it certainly doesn't hurt.
CM: No, no, it definitely doesn't. You talk a lot about like, all the things like, let's backtrack to … you start out residential, which I think is what everybody thinks about lending. They think about auto and they think about residential.
LS: Mortgage. That’s the first thing they think about.
CM: They think about a mortgage. Right. You know, we all mostly, some of us, have those and that's what you think about. But you mentioned other things like getting into aviation. How did you get into those adjacent market?
LS: Need. Customer need. And also it's really good. Anyone who's in the real estate market, the traditional residential real estate market, the past few years, it's been okay.
It hasn't been stellar. But what has been stellar through that whole time has been commercial. So we've you know, we leaned towards the commercial and we just shift our success where it is. Right now the maritime industry is ridiculous. It is so good. It's booming, and that's where we shifted a lot of our focus. We still have a residential team.
We have a commercial team, the aviation team. But that's what's hot right now. So you just shift and adjust, and it gives us lots of different ways to keep our business going profitable and and still in the eyes of a lot of different customers, because if they bought a house, they might buy a commercial building.
CM: They might.
LS: They might buy a boat.
CM: They might.
LS: They might buy a plane. And so we're kind of like a one stop shop for lending, as far as that goes.
CM: And that's really unique. That's really unique. Because I know a lot of times you think about your mortgage, right? Then that's what they do. That's their bread and butter. You don't think about them for any other type of lending whatsoever and especially not business lending typically. So that does make it a little bit different.
So how have you, as you shifted the business based on customer need, listening to your customers, them coming to you and saying like, hey, could you help me out with this? How have you evolved the team over time to come with you? Because sometimes, as I think entrepreneurs, where I like to say to people, I love to run into burning buildings, but sometimes my team doesn't want run into the building with me. Like “Christina, that's –
LS: “You going to take that one? We'll be over here.”
CM: We'll be over here. Like, call us if you need us.”
How did you evolve the team over time? Because obviously you're not doing all the things.
LS: Doing a lot of the things. I have two great partners, for steel we have a third partner.
The three of us are a great team. Delegating and just showing the excitement. Where do you want to make X this year or do you want to make Y this year? Yeah. And if you want to stay in residential and that's your heart and soul, please stay there.
CM: Kill it.
LS: You can. If you get a commercial client, you can just push it over. We have a different team that can take care of that.
So I think the way to get people energized is to show them how lucrative each thing can be, right? And how adding something isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I'm a learner. I think that people that are learners, I think we've done a really good job of surrounding people that like to learn and build. So I think that that's been a big help, too, because they're excited about learning other things too.
CM: Right, something new. So, speaking of learning, I think the thing that everyone you know, it's talking about right now is, the disruption. Like we have technology disruption all the time. I'm not even going to use the word because I'm so tired of hearing about it.
But for me, whether it's automation, you know, etc., we've in these traditional markets, these new shiny toys come on through and, you know, there's just this perception that the human element is going to go by the wayside. Right? I've seen so many iterations, especially in the marketing and revenue operations world, like, “oh yeah, no, the computer,” it's like “no, the computer's not. somebody's still got to do this. It's just the tool is different.”
What have you seen, what are you incorporating? And especially since you guys have such a growth mindset and you are looking for opportunities, is there anything there in this crazy evolving market where we're in right now?
LS: So yeah, so we use the things, we use those tools, to streamline, be more efficient. Where it makes sense. Emails, some of our social media that's kind of more on the automated side. There's still a human behind it actually creating pieces of it and just putting it together in a prettier package. But we are still very much boots on the ground, which is why one thing I really love, especially with structural steel, and we do sell that across the country.
But if you are right here from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, I think North Carolina, we've gone down to, the great thing is that my partner, I'm not part of this, but they will go and look at the site with a contractor if you don't know exactly how big your building is going to be or what exactly you want, they will go there.
They will look at it. They will check it out. If you're building a Marina, they've got they've been going down quite a bit down to Southern Maryland looking at there's a couple of marinas that they’re working on down there. And you know, you get your car and you go. Or, some of this stuff is not right now.
It's just the most frustrating thing, we could talk about that if you want to. But yeah, a lot of it's not right now. But you know, they're going to go and they're going to look at it and they're going to talk to you about it. So if you tell me, “I want to build this building in a year”, we go down, we look, and you say, “well, we're going to need a year to get the money together. We're going to need … whatever.”
“Cool. When do you want us to call you? What time, what day.”
And we'll call in that time of day, but it’s still not time. What's the next time you want us to call? And we'll call in that time of day. And so there is still very much a very human element to what we do. And I think there has to be. I think that no business can be successful with robots, not even the grocery checkout line knows
CM: Nope.
LS: Because you still have to call a human over nine times out of ten trying to get your bananas through. And there's the SKU number on there, and every single time it picks up the SKU and then the guy has to come over and push the button. So are we actually automated? I mean, really not.
CM: No. No, we're really not. It's an efficiency tool. But, you know, I think the human element and the originality and the creativity. So what you've been able to build, literally, starting with lending, moving into actually building the building, the steel component, that's human creativity that is getting inspiration from a customer, seeing a need and figuring it out.Right. That spark comes from you.
LS: Well, there's no robot in the universe that would have said, “hey, lenders of my business partner 40 years. Let's go into steel now”. Yeah, there’s no robot that would have said that. So there was a lot of human communication that brought that on.
CM: What it was like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, like what was the initial reaction like, “Oh? Okay.”
LS: That was me. That was me. I was the, “Oh.. okay”. They came in, “Oh, we're doing this. This is going to be great. We're going to do this. We're going to add this on. We're going to to invest in this company. And we're going to start selling structural steel buildings”. And I was like, “Oh, okay. We are”. At first I was like, “What?”
And then when you start learning about it and then you get to, I do a lot of networking, you get to move into a whole different group of people, and meet different groups of people. It got more exciting. And then, you know, now I'm learning about pitches and steel weight and load bearing, load bearing I never would have said that five years ago.
CM: Snow load.
LS: Exactly. All these things, these terminologies and all the things that it takes to build it. So yes, at first I was like, “Steel?” But then.. listen. If you can sell a salesperson, you’re sold.
CM: Yeah you’ve got it. You're sold. Exactly. You know, networking, getting back into that human component. But networking has been a big part of your success.
LS: Huge, huge.
CM: And I think for some people, they find it kind of cringey, you know, or they give up on it because it's the same circles over and over and over again. You're like, okay, like the opportunities are not in the room. What advice do you give to someone? You've been naturally moving into adjacent markets, which opens you up into new groups.
So you know, now that you've done that multiple times, what would be some of the advice that you would give to someone that is just kind of like, “Ugh, really?”
LS: I think the number one thing is that you're not selling to the person in the room. If you go into a mindset when you walk into a room, you're trying to meet someone that knows someone that has the need for your product.
I think if you always go with that mindset, that's going to be successful every time.
CM: Okay.
LS: Also, seeing those people over and over again, you start learning about their dog, children, where they live, what they like. Hey, do you want to go bowling? Hey, do you want to go grab an adult beverage? Hey, are you a coffee person? Let's go grab a coffee. I'm usually the adult beverage girl, just saying.
CM: I love an adult beverage.
LS: Right, but meeting people and getting to know people, it's the same old, like, know and trust that we've heard for 100 years that it absolutely does. And the more that you do, the more people remember you. So they're going to remember you have your podcast, you're in construction. You do lending. Oh, I know someone who can provide that building for you. I think she can also, fund it for you if you need financing. That's why networking works. Sometimes. It's exhausting. Smiling is exhausting.
CM: I think as a woman, that hits it on a different level.
LS: I'll say it all the time, I do not smile on the weekends. People invite me out on the weekends all the time. I'm going to my cousin's bridal shower this weekend and I'm like, why couldn't she do that on a Thursday? Now I have to smile on a Saturday. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, it can be exhausting. But when you think about the end game, you're meeting people. I didn't know I needed concrete when I went into structural steel.
Do you know how many concrete people are out there? I need concrete, I need erectors. I may be in a building where there are no erectors, but they know them, and that is beneficial both ways. So you just have to go into the mindset with: the person in the room is not my customer, it’s who they know.
CM: It’s who they know. And that's so typical too, because usually, in a lot of cases, the decision maker isn't the person in the room.
LS: Absolutely.
CM: It's usually not. So, and in these industries too, we don't have a tendency to be so extroverted, you know.
LS: Especially with the men.
CM: Oh, I mean, that's okay, you know.
LS: It works for me, I'm making it work.
CM: You're making it work. You're making it work. So, you know, like, when you move into that next adjacent space, how do you educate customers? Because a lot of times we run into this, too, I think, where we get known for one thing.
LS: Sure.
CM: And then they don't realize that we do all these other things. For us, our journey was we started out as a marketing firm, and then we moved into being revenue operations. And everybody was like, first off, what the heck is that, right? So there's that education issue. But then also just getting them to understand like, no, we do technical CRM implementations. We do bridge the gap between sales, service and marketing, etc..
So you know that education leap sometimes is like... because they think marketing, they think: Don Draper. And I just want to bang my head into a wall, basically.
LS: With a smile, of course.
CM: With a smile, of course. So how do you I mean, you kind of have the same thing. You think of lending, and lending is very cut and dry.
LS: Very.
CM: How do you kind of bridge that gap that they're like, “Oh, she's into lending”. You're like, “Yeah, I'm your steel girl”.
LS: So the first thing I do is I shoot away from residential as quick as possible. So I always start with, you know, we do commercial lending where they need buildings, we do fleet lending. If you need a bulldozer or you need a TV van, or you need an air conditioning van, whatever you need, we can provide that also.
So I never lead with residential when I tell people about that. And then I say, and then by happenstance, we started a structural steel arm. And right now this is kind of top secret. This is an exclusive.
CM: Oh, look at you.
LS: Breaking news. We are going into the metal roofing business because someone needed a metal roof and we can wholesale that. And so now we have started adding that to our portfolio.
CM: Portfolio of work.
LS: And so I think the marketing that we do like our drip campaigns, we always they're very categorized. So if you're a commercial client, it always has it kind of like at the bottom, you know, what the other things that we have.
And our website. So if you lead people to your website, which we had to do a rebrand, we now are for 4Bridges Enterprises because we have so many verticals underneath of it that we umbrella’d it. So when you go to our website, you're like, “wait, what?”
CM: “You do all that?”
LS: You don't realize how many things. So now that we have that, tool, partially automated, a lot human, that's been a big game changer too, because when you say enterprises are like, “Oh, well, what is that?”
And then you can say, “Well, we have different divisions in lending, and then we have, a construction piece as well.”
CM: Have you ever run into, you know, as you've grown the company, this perception of size. What I mean by that is, you know, you say the word enterprises. Oh, yeah. Enterprises sounds..
LS: Sexy and big.
CM: Big. Hundreds of people, right?
LS: Of course
CM: We're not.
LS: We're not.
CM: We have big impact, but we're smaller teams. Do you run into that?
LS: Not so much, I think, because, we are not only national, but international for the maritime. So the people that are here kind of know. And there's a lot of enterprises out there that just.. not saying that it's just a name because it's not because it truly is a big bulk of different types of things underneath one umbrella.
But, I haven't had that yet. Maybe I have and I have been paying attention. So now, Christina, you've got me paying attention to what people are saying.
CM: Yeah, it's, I find it really interesting. It's I always, shouldn't be judgy, but I always judge when someone is very vocal about headcount, and I'm just like, you just have a lot of overhead. That's not my definition of success.
LS: Amen. Our office is small. I am a Frugal Fanny. We are in the process of building another room in our office, and I am on Wayfair, I am in Ollie’s. I am the most frugal person, so we don't have a lot of that overhead. So yes, enterprises does sound huge actually, now that I’m thinking about it.
But it is a big deal to us. I mean, yeah, you know, my partner started this company, about 25 years ago. So the build from there up has been building it into enterprises. You know, when you go from 1 to 2, men, people, when you go from 1 to 2 people to, you know, not 100 people, but more people and more offices. You know, it's enterprising.
CM: It is. It is enterprising. We talk about being nimble a lot. Right? You've been very nimble, seen a need in the market, listening to the customer, you know, learning, having a growth mindset, attracting teams that have a growth mindset to bring those services in to your customers, which is also, you know, I think a really good lesson.
It's not just a Breakout Moment, but it's also you're hedging against risk.
LS: Absolutely.
CM: And we go through cycles. And if your chips are all in on one thing, I mean, you go through one bad cycle and your number comes up. There's not much you can do about it. You can be the best business person in the world. You can be as Frugal Fanny as you want to be. Sometimes the market just wins.
LS: And that's why we have so many different verticals.
CM: And I love that. I absolutely love that about what you’ve done.
LS: It was by accident, but it’s working out.
CM: Each one just kind of builds from another. Warren Buffett has a saying about a snowball.
LS: Absolutely. You just gave me goosebumps.
CM: And what you've been able to do is actually just kind of roll that snowball. Because one thing then leads to another thing, leads to another thing.
Last question for you that I want to dig into is, as you've been adding these things, how have you kind of kept the core of what you do? You know, the heart of what you do without spreading yourself too thin?
LS: Oh that's a whole 'nother podcast.
CM: Briefly, briefly. We'll do a follow up for that.
LS: No. You know, delegating. Knowing what you're strong at, knowing what you're not strong at. And really keeping focus on the end game, you know, keeps me going. Personal time, gym time. Those things give that separation.
But all in all, I think it's delegating. Stick to what you're good at. Give that responsibility to someone else who's really good at that thing. And then it will just all flow and work at the same time.
CM: Yep. It's that. I could not agree with you more when it comes to that. Know what you know and what you love. What gets you up to do?
LS: Passion. What’s your passion?
CM: Be passionate. Yeah, if you're not passionate about it.. I told somebody if the day happens that I wake up and I am like, “Ugh, I don't want to go to work”, I haven't had that happen to me. Like maybe 1 or 2 days where it was just more of like, “I'm not feeling good. I just got off a plane”, like that kind of thing.
But if I'm just not ready to go, inspired by the day, what I do, you know, I haven't had that in 13 plus years now. And as long as you're able to keep that going, recognize what you do and move your team into their strengths, It all falls together.
LS: And that's how you know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
CM: Yes.
LS: That's how you know that is where you should be. You should not be over here selling structural steel and worrying about, you know, financing from the ground up, which is something else that we do: land, build, and we do all the financing for all the construction.
See, how excited I got? I was like "Oh my gosh, we do everything!!"
CM: You do!
LS: In fact, if you don't have that, anyone who's listening, if you don't have that right, the second you either need to find it or shift to something else.
CM: Yes.
LS: That's their breakout. Figure it out. If you don't love what you're doing, find something that makes you get excited about every single day. That's a good ending.
CM: Yes it is, I was going to say that's perfect. So I've just loved having this conversation with you. Thank you for coming on today.
LS: I know you’re so fantastic. Thank you for having me on, and it's been a good day.
CM: Yeah. It's always a great day.
LS: I love it.
CM: Thanks.
LS: Until next time.
CM: Next time.