Didn't you tell me that one of your frameworks is where you are making changes is typically back office, and the things in the field is where you'll, you'll touch things dead last sort of thing. Say more about that.
Acquiring Minds
From Software to Concrete Cutting (and $1.4m of SDE)
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Yes, my trans. Sure. So my, my transition meeting when we first bought the business, I was very careful to say, you know, I don't have any change planned. Every, I need everybody that's working here to continue working here, and we're not going to introduce a lot of change individually. I met with everybody and the people in the office.
I said that's not entirely true. Like, if there's things we can do with the, the inner workings of the business, we're going to do that to become more efficient. But what I don't want to do is affect the field workers.
Right. So where this goes, when we're, when we assign a job and send somebody out to a job, I don't want their, anything we do to make their job more complex. I want them to go out, cut and remove concrete, you know, toss it in the dumpster, bring it back to the shop, or pour concrete back over what we've done. I don't want to make it any more difficult for the field because they're our bread and…
They can't be frustrated. Right. That would fall back on us. So I'm more than happy to address things in the office and try and make things more efficient there. I'm very hesitant to do any of that with the field workers.
Tom, circling back now to the earnings, the healthy earnings of this business. 1-3-1 4, you've got your big SBA loan, but can you share how much this is paying you, how much you're taking home? And is that how you think about that, how that squares with what you were making in your corporate career, et cetera?
Sure. So I've made my take home pay very similar to what I, what I was making as an executive. I'm paying myself 260 with, with a bonus to get me to about 300 a year. Right. Based on performance, there's more cash flow in the business.
Right. So I'm not taking that initially. We do have more depreciated assets than I realized in the, in the first year and a half, we've had to buy three vehicles And a, and a diesel saw. Right. Those are. It's probably another 175,000 of, of spending that I've done.
But as I'm going through this, I'm watching very carefully that, you know, cash flow accumulates, that my accounts receivable continues to grow. We're about to go into our, our second summer with me at the helm. And summer is a very, very expensive time for us.
It's where the majority of our hours come in. We just don't get paid for those hours till October or November. Right. So we're coming into kind of a cash flow crunch time frame for us.
But yeah, I think it's, I think everything is operating as it should or as it was planned. I haven't seen any huge changes. Demand is down a little bit, but we're talking like 5%.
And last year at this time, I think our demand was down 10%. And then the rest of the year it overperformed 10%. So everybody in the business just tells me that this happens.
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