9 Streamlining Construction: Subcontracting, Collaboration, and Quality

In this podcast episode, hosts Landon and Drew discuss the advantages of subcontracting in construction projects over in-house work. They highlight misconceptions about subcontracting and its benefits, emphasizing specialized expertise and improved quality from subcontractors' focused work. The hosts liken subcontractors to specialized tools, noting their role in achieving better results. Efficiency, professionalism, and enhanced quality, including appearance and time management, are emphasized. They explain how subcontracting fosters collaboration and customer-focused approaches, minimizing conflicts and enabling contractor-client advocacy. The hosts counter the belief that subcontracting raises costs, asserting its value outweighs slight expense increases. They delve into back-end processes, relationship management, pricing, and the critical role of general contractors. The value of general contractor-subcontractor relationships is highlighted, emphasizing teamwork and communication efficiency. Misconceptions about contractor motives are addressed, and complexities of accurate pricing and budgeting are clarified. Risks tied to inexperienced contractors are discussed, alongside subcontractor performance and scheduling challenges. The collaborative essence of construction is acknowledged. The hosts underline professionalism, transparency, and mutual respect for successful projects.

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Transcript

So why do we subcontract everything out? Why don't we have in house workers? Why specifically do we use specific subcontractors for the specific work? So there's all kinds of stuff with this subject, right? One thing that's a question we get lot though, right? Someone will come in, oh, you guys are a suitcase contractor. You guys don't have any infield workers, or however you want to say it, right? As if it's a bad thing. Almost like it's a bad thing.

And you know what? We've had so much better luck. So when I first started the business, we used to do everything in house. But you know, what happens is you hire a few guys and they do pretty good work.

Say they're a siding guy or whatever, and they can do good siding work. Maybe they do good roofing, maybe they do good framing or whatever it is. But then to take that guy and then go try to install trim or try to install tile or do some painting or whatever it is, is going to be way less efficient and the quality is less.

That was the first reason originally, way back, it would have been like, I don't know, ten years ago or something that I started subbing everything out because you get a whole bunch of workers, and one of them might be good at each thing, but then to put them all together and oh, we need to go trim out this house now. And the quality of work is higher with a subcontractor who focuses on that every day, that's all they do is they're framing their roofing, whatever it is. I like the analogy of we'd rather use a sharp knife for the job instead of a utility knife that can do the job.

Right. If you're in house and unless you're a really big company and you're literally covering every single aspect of a build, which is darn near impossible, you're going to be getting some overlap in skill. You're going to be getting some overlap in how things are managed, and it just gets less efficient and sloppy.

One thing that I noticed is if you have a worker work for you for, say, five years, by the time that five, construction is generally this way. Someone works for a company for a few years, five years about, and then they decide they want to I know where this is going, go find somewhere else to work. Or they want to start their own company and maybe they move out of state.

Workers are constantly coming through. But when you have a professional atmosphere, that's less likely to happen because people in a professional atmosphere tend to stick out their jobs longer, right? It's a career, not a job. Yes, that's a big reason why we went this route is, one, the quality goes way up.

When you have a professional focusing on that specific thing that he does, and not just quality and product by the way. Also quality and management. Quality and time cleanliness.

Just the overall quality. Oh, yeah. Appearance.

Even, like when they've come on the job and they have a work truck that's all set up specifically for what they have, and it's a nice vehicle. Versus the general contractor's truck, which was just used for pouring a foundation yesterday, has also been used for, whatever, hauling a giant 16 foot chunks of trim or whatever. Yeah.

So now, yeah, you're just crossing over professions, and it's really hard to look professional when you're trying to look professional in all things. You can't have a lawnmower and a coil of wire in the back of your truck and say that you're specific at something. Right.

If I see a guy who's that's a very valid point, even in appearance when I look at a very well ran company. Let's take lawn care, for example. You think of a lawn care service as mowing, weed, eating, spraying, maybe, or whatever.

That's what you picture. You're not thinking, oh, he's got fencing material as well. Or he's got or maybe he does.

Maybe he know he doesn't have conduit hanging off of his truck because he's going to be shoving some electrical stuff in or whatever. He's specific. And I want to hire this specific guy for the specific job.

I don't want the Joe Blow who can do it all drew's lawn care and power pole. Right, right. You might as well walk into, like, just like, shopping.

Right? If I'm going to walk into a shoe store versus walking into a multipurpose store, if I'm in the market for shoes, I'm going to go to a shoe store. I'm not going to go to Walmart, right. Or whatever.

Even if Walmart did have a lot of shoes or more shoe selection than they have, I'm still going to go to the shoe store. That's what it's designed for. I'm probably going to get a better deal.

I'm probably going to get a better product. I'm going to get better service. It's tailored around what I'm after.

The same thing. And for me, like, let's just use your analogy of shoe shopping at Walmart. They might actually have cheaper shoes, but they're not going to last long.

So are they truly? Is it even apples to apples? Yeah. It's not. And so you go to a shoe store, you go to a I don't even who cares what shoe store it is? Right, but you go to a shoe store that carries high quality shoes, and you get a good product that lasts a long time, and you're happy with it.

Yes, exactly. It's the same thing with Subcontractors. We want the professional, not the knows how to do it guy.

We want the professional who does it for a living. He knows every little in and out of that specific role. He knows all the little nuances.

He knows all the little tricks. He knows how to work with the other Subcontractors he has years of experience working with custom builds and custom contractors. He has his guys lined up.

Everyone has their specific role. It's just a well oiled machine. Yeah.

And then when he has you mentioned earlier, just briefly, the schedule, the timing of how they're doing stuff, which is huge, they're going to do it twice as fast, they're going to show up on time, done right? So little disclaimer. There's good and there's bad subcontractors. But with being in business for a long time, you vet out the bad contractors, right? And you stick with the good subcontractors.

So you call X, Y and Z Heating and you get them on your schedule and they show up when they say they're going to do their job in a shorter period of time, they clean up. When they're done, they're gone. Something ever happens down the road, they back it up with a warranty.

They're always happy to come back. Now, kind of the point of our subject, though, was why do we do subcontractors versus in house work? And one thing that I want to point out is when you're in that position, let's just say you did the work yourself and the homeowner is on site and they're like, oh, I don't think you're doing this right. I think you need to do this this way.

You automatically, as the boss of those employees, you automatically take a little defensive side, you're like, well, wait a minute, no, my guys really know what they're doing, right? And that can start to build a wall between you and the customer. And so what we do is we strictly manage jobs. We'll manage jobs better than anybody else because we're not in the field looking over let me rephrase that, because we are looking over what they're doing, but we're not doing it as though we're doing it right.

Because we know and like and trust our subcontractors. Exactly. We know that they're going to do their job properly and we're going to let them and empower them to do their job.

Yeah. And then we just need to ensure that it's done correctly. But my point is that if we're coming at this from the owner of the business and the boss of those specific guys performing the work on site, there's almost like a little bit of a wall between the homeowner and the builder.

Because we want to stick up for our guys, because we want them to have a good job. We want them to be stuck up for right. I mean, they want to feel that way.

Sort of a buffer zone there. Yeah. But when we sub everything out, now we're on the side of the customer because that subcontractor bid that job in a way that he knew he could do it and he needed to stand behind his bid and the homeowner comes out and says, I don't think that's done right.

I don't think this is the way we had talked about it being I can then side with the homeowner and say, you're right, I'm going to go talk to this guy and we're going to work through this versus taking a defensive side. Right. I love how it works both ways.

In that sense, it's good for us. We have these vetted subcontractors that we can trust and therefore it makes us look good when they're doing good and vice versa. At the same time, if something happens, there isn't that that strain or that void between client and contractor.

The client ultimately has someone in their corner who's always going to be on their side. Hey, I'm going to step in. I noticed the subcontractor didn't quite live up to the expectations.

I know this guy. We've been working together for years. I'm going to go talk to him.

I'm going to step up for you. I'm going to make sure that you get what you want. Well, one thing I mentioned earlier is we can manage our jobs really well.

And the beauty of that is because we're focusing on that 100%. We've built this long relationship before we broke ground on the house with setting up all these selections and going through all these processes that are required to go through versus focusing on the physical part of the work, right. So we've focused all of our energy on the management and setting everything up.

So when we do hire our subcontractors, everything is spelled out and articulated in a way that they can show up and do their job and leave. There is just another little point to this too. I've been the subcontractor, I did electrical for about five years.

And there is a huge difference, a humongous difference, being on a job that is well managed and working for a general contractor who has their Poop in a group versus the guy who's just kind of all over the place and the same guy who's doing the roof is generaling it. But he's like, there is such a difference. The organization, the cleanliness, the scheduling, the timing, the callbacks, oh, I changed this, I added that.

Well, that wasn't on the plan. It's so much more enjoyable looking at it from a subcontractor's viewpoint. It's so much more enjoyable.

Those are the jobs that you're like, you know what? Yes, you're asking for a bid on this or that. I'm going to bid on that right now. I want to perform for you.

You're the kind of guy I want to work with. And to be honest with you, we've had quite a few subcontractors say we want to do your work, we love doing your work. How can we improve? What can we do to make sure that you succeed? And those are literally questions that we get from our subcontractors because they want to continue doing our work.

Right. Because it's working. It's working and it truly is a win win.

It's good for us. It's good for the subcontractor. And ultimately that all boils down to it being good for the client.

Yeah. So we get this quite a bit. Well, I think I can manage the job myself and I want to save the money.

I don't want to have a general contractor come in and just add this markup on top of everything, right? Because that's what we do. We get a bid, we click bids from everybody, all of our subcontractors. We actually price out all of our materials.

And as we build our proposal, we then add a percentage on top for our general contractors fee. And we're very open about that. We just tell them, hey, look, this is how we do our process is how it works.

And we have this management fee and our profit and overhead, et cetera. It's all open book. It's all open book.

And someone's like, well, but if I didn't hire you, I'd save X amount of dollars, right? And that's not necessarily true. And I'll tell you what, I've gone through material suppliers and all of our subcontractors and asked them, if a person who is not a contractor walks in your door and says, I need a quote on this bid, what's the percentage difference between that bid and mine? The markup higher for the average homeowner. Let's see, what am I saying here? We receive between 17 and 25% discount across the board, right? Overall, it might be less on one item, might be more on another.

Yeah. There are certain things like, for example, lumber. There's not a very big markup on lumber specifically, so we might not see a 25% discount, but things like hardware or windows or subcontractors, we might see 20% to 25% discount on the average person who walks in when that person's not getting repeat business from them.

So we're going to pretty much the same people over and over and over, and they know that they have a relationship with us and we can count on them and they can count on us. And they're going to give us their best pricing because they can show up and do their job and get it done and leave. And they've done it before.

Multiple times. We work with them multiple times. We already have that experience.

We know it works. And so therefore, we get discounts better than your average person, by the way, just for the people listening. This isn't specifically first choice builders either.

This is all contractors or most contractors out there. Every contractor out there in some way has his own little relationships, even at a smaller scale. The electrician's got his little relationship with his electrical supplier, right? He's getting a better price on a roll of wire than the guy who walks through the door.

This is sort of a normal thing in the industry. This isn't specifically first choice builders. Yeah.

But our markup is going to be less than what we're saving the person. So you could almost say it's like a break. You're almost not paying us to manage all this stuff.

Yeah, you're breaking now, just to play devil's advocate here a little bit that may be true and it may not be true. It might swing a little bit one way or the other, depending on the job. If it's like a massive custom build, whatever, I think that's really where we shine.

If you are just funneled down to a very basic starter home type of deal, perhaps you could argue the point that ash sure, if you're going to manage it yourself. But even then, like I mentioned, I think in a previous podcast episode, we talked about how even the simplest build has so much complexity to it. So to reclarify your point here, the difference they're going to save is minute when compared and lined up to the value of what a general contractor can bring to the table as far as management timing everything.

So people need to they either accept the value or they don't. If they don't see the value in hiring a general contractor, even at a monetary stance. And that's the thing, is it's not like if somebody has their eyes set on building their own house, then that's great.

Yeah. We're just not a fit for that. Right.

Obviously, go knock yourself out and nobody will be a fit for that because they want to build their own place, right? But I think what can happen is people don't necessarily see the value in having subcontractors versus general contractor doing all his own work. And our point is that we can save so much time, we can save so much money on our bids, we can get things headache. Yeah, the headache.

We're doing all these things and overall the value has to be justified by the homeowner. But Monetarily, it really shouldn't be a big difference, right? We'll say 85, 90% of the time. You could say it's a wash if you're working with a good contractor.

Yeah, it's a wash, Monetarily, but then you have to do everything yourself. Exactly. Here's another interesting thing to add to this.

I don't think most people really understand just how much is done on the back end of a project. That's like 60% of the job is the back end. People only see that the physical they're looking at the tangible item.

Oh, land, you foundation, it's all simple. You just boom, boom, boom. And no, that is not the case.

There is so much time invested in back and forth with a supplier, getting quotes put together, back and forth with your subcontractors, collecting bids, comparing them, doing the price breakdown. You have a guy that you're paying who's doing all this, right? Your project coordinator. You got a project manager who's chasing this thing down or that thing down, or helping you with some better deal and running back out in the field and dropping the door off and making sure there's so much on the back end that people just don't even understand.

And I'm living in a house. I experienced that. I'm living in my current home right now.

I built that and going into it, I did not realize how much was on the back end. You think that building the house is strictly just, oh, I just go build the house? Physically? No, that's like half of it. That's what the contractor handles.

It's all that back end. It's literally a full time job. The back end is literally a full time job for one house.

And then you throw on the added layer of you're doing a construction loan. Now you're working with a bank. You have a draw system set up.

You have to do these draws once a week or whatever. There's all this invoicing and timing that goes in with your subcontractors and your suppliers to the draw system with the bank, it can get pretty complicated. And so having someone who knows how to do all that stuff and has done it over and over and over and over and just got a system dialed for that, there's so much value in that.

Yeah, one thing that I've been asked to do a few times is bid a house for somebody with all of our subcontractors, bid it as though we were going to build it and then help out through the permitting process, but actually not build it. It was a homeowner who wanted to build their own place. I've done this twice, I think a homeowner came to me and said, hey, this is what I want to do.

I want to build my own house. But all of this preliminary type worked, and I need help with I don't know the schedule, I don't know the subs, I don't know the organization, I don't know the budget, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know how to permit.

He's like, but when it comes to the building part, I can take care of that. And to be honest with you, I actually did do it, and I just charged a fee for that. Like, well, it's like a friend or whatever.

Yeah, I can do that. And so I did, and it turned out good. But that's not our general line of work.

I just did it to somebody else. Kind of a unique situation. Yeah, that's another thing too.

I know we're kind of diving off here a little bit from the subcontractor thing, but I'd like to tie this into why there's so much value in a contractor. Having all this stuff set up and ready to go, even rather than spending your six months on your Excel sheet before you can even pull a permit, is huge. Time is really valuable.

So if you have all the time in the world and you're retired and you got nothing better to do, and you want to go build your own house, knock yourself out. Go do it. But if you're worried about this difference in gap of, oh, well, you're just taking the cream off the top.

Then you're not clearly seeing what exactly a general contractor does. And that's what we're trying to bring out. Exactly.

And the subcontractors are a humongous component of that because they're the ones actually doing the work. But they're reliant on us. We're reliant on them.

It's in the same party there and you don't get that same type of subcontractor performance when you're just Joe Blow off the street. It's very, very different relationship between a general contractor and his years of trusted subcontractors. That relationship, yeah.

So what would you think is one of the most common misconceptions of a general contractor? Who is? They're out to screw you. Like subbing everything out. Yeah, they're just out to screw you.

I've actually gotten this comment one time. I was kind of shocked. It's pretty blatant.

This gal had called me and she had gotten some quotes from different contractors and right out the gate I could tell she was pretty frustrated. I just think every contractor out there is just looking to maximize their profits and blah, blah, blah and just screw everyone over. And I thought, okay, I mean, sure there's some bad apples out there, but no, that's not the case.

Most people are good. Yeah, I didn't say anything. Exactly.

Most people are good and I didn't say anything. I just let her talk. And she brought out that she had this project, she had their plans and she was getting some quotes on it and every contractor was just so high, it's so expensive and they're just screwing me over.

Right. So I asked, well, tell me more about your project. What exactly are you looking to do? Her budget and her project were so misaligned.

It was like a 5000 square foot build on this blah, blah, blah. She needed a septic system, like this huge custom project. She wanted a walkout basement and this double sliding thing.

And I said, well, what are you looking to spend? And she said, between six and 700,000. And I just kind of made me realize that. I don't know why, but so many people believe that general contractors, like there's this bad rap for what they charge.

I think that a lot of them would be shocked just to see how little they actually make in comparison to what they think. I'd be really curious to see what that lady, if she was to go directly to all those subcontractors, how the bid would have been. Yeah, absolutely.

It would have probably been higher. Oh yeah. I would about guarantee it'd be right.

Well, between 15 and 23% higher. Yeah, exactly. To just finish the story here, I said, it seems to me like you have some unrealistic expectations because there's no way you're going to get a house.

What you described, I'm not even having to look at a set of plans. I can already tell you that you're way off the mark. There's no way.

And there's no way we could travel down to where you are, which was further down in the state, and do it for cheaper. There's no way. And she was just silenced, stunned.

And I said, you need to understand that one, building is expensive, and two, a board is a board. That's what it costs. We can't really change that.

The subcontractor costs what it costs, and then a general contractor is not going to do a product for free. So there's a reason why it costs what it does. And it's unfortunate that it's not working out for you.

It's unfortunate that your expectations and your budget are so misaligned. But that's just the cold, hard reality when there are certain people who will get I don't know if you'd call it lucky, but they'll get a cheap price from somebody because there's a lot of contractors out there that actually don't know how to price. They don't understand their cost, they might misrepresent what materials are, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that general contractor is, one, either going to go out of business, or two, have massive change orders, right? Typically the latter, yeah. But when you're subcontracting everything out and you actually price every aspect of the job, you collect bids from every subcontractor, and you're pricing out every piece of material, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and you spend all that time going through this process with the customer, you're as accurate as can be. I don't even know.

98% accuracy. 99% accuracy. How can you get more accurate? Yes, there's some wild cards in any product.

There's always something that can crop up. But if you're telling me your average joke and come up with a more accurate price than that, you're off your rocker. There's no flipping way.

There's just no way. People that think that, well, I priced it out, and it was way cheaper. It's like, I'd love to see what exactly you priced out.

I'll lay nine out of ten that what I bid out is going to be accurate. Chances are yeah, chances are quite high that they've missed quite a few things. Right.

And consider this, too. They're going like people who think they can do that. There's people that do this for a living every single week.

Their price catalog on every board, every type of board length, box of nails, type in their price catalog updates, right? They're getting their updated current pricing. They're getting accurate quotes from trusted suppliers that they've used for years. You're going against you when you're a general contractor who's focused simply on the management.

That's actually what you're doing. You know, Brian in our office, he's doing that. He has a price catalog.

He's going through it and he's updating it, constantly pricing out every piece of material for the job because he has time to focus on if Brian was also a framer, he would not have time to be biding jobs. He would not have time to price accurately. He would not have time to update the price catalog and ensure that the takeoff program is working correctly.

And he'd be out framing a house or he'd be installing a foundation. Who knows, right. Getting back to sort of the subcontractor thing, subcontractors know this.

So to tie into this point, subcontractors know that that it can't be accurate or as accurate as, say, a trusted contractor or there's a lot of unknowns. They're taking a risk by working with some random guy, even if they even choose to. And their chances are they're probably too busy.

But if they do, they know they're taking a chance that's going to reflect on their bid. And that is one of the reasons why they know there's so many unknowns. The homeowner probably didn't account for this.

They're not in the industry. They're not a contractor, so they have to put up with that. Yeah, I do know you brought up a good point here that sparked a thought.

I do know that some of our subcontractors have actually been approached by homeowners after we bid on the project. Those subcontractors have actually called and told us, hey, look, just so you know, the homeowner is looking at doing this themselves now, and they're asking for bids, but we just told them we couldn't do it. Yes.

So you build this relationship where you have each other's backs and you have this whole team. And in doing that, you trust each other. You have this compatibility.

And to be clear, it's not out to screw anybody. It's not out to, oh, it's me and my subcontractor buddies against so and so. Right? That's not what it is.

We know our own value and we know what we can bring to the table and we know what our worth is. So if you're going to the example you gave is almost like an insult. If you're going to play that game, go research all the numbers you want.

I don't care. Like you mentioned earlier, our books are open. You can see everything.

It's all transparent. We're not hiding anything. In fact, the very opposite.

We give often more info than we probably should. But for you to get a price, you not like it for one reason or another, that's fine. If you can't afford it, it's fine.

There's no issue there. But then to kind of go behind the back and go ask a subcontractor, hey, can you just do it on the side? Or maybe even pull somebody from inside the company and say, hey, can you just actually come and do it on the weekend? My answer is going to be, you know what? No. If I do, it's going to be more expensive.

Yeah. And the thing is, I guess kind of what I was getting at is that it's not that anybody's out to screw anybody. It's just that we've built such a solid team.

With the guys that we work with that they don't have the time or ability to start taking on work through people that they don't know and understand. Right. For all the reasons we mentioned.

Yes. And if our plumber or our HVAC guy or whoever does have a lull in their schedule, they will go do those jobs. So it's not about that.

It's just that generally they're so busy with the people that they know already that they're not taking on extra work. Right. Why would they go and take an unnecessary risk, say, on a project? There's a lot of unknowns.

Or they can just keep on chugging along and doing great with this contractor that things have been working out great for years. Well, which one are you going to do? So, no, that's a valid point. Here's a question.

This is sort of from a different angle. As a general contractor, what are some things that subcontractors do that just bug you? Because I'm sure you've been in this business a lot longer than most of us. Yes.

So one of the biggest things, honestly, and I said earlier on this show, I said something along the lines of they show up generally and do their job well. One of my biggest pet peeves is when somebody over schedules themselves. They're like, yeah, I can be there next week and they don't be there next week.

And we have them on the schedule, everything is clicking along material, the homeowner is waiting for them to show up, materials on site, no subcontractor. So that has happened, definitely. And that's one of my biggest pet peeves, I would say between that and not understanding what they're building, or like, for example, let's just say they bid a framing job and they didn't understand the complexity of, say, the roof and then partway through the job, they're like, man, we kind of miss bid this.

And then the conversation starts. Well, can we start doing a change order? Well, no, we can't do a change order because this is how the plans were drawn. If you didn't spend enough time looking at it, then that's your problem.

And I have to side with the homeowner. Absolutely. You've bid this and that's.

Why should the homeowner have to pay for your incompetence? Right. So those are probably the two biggest things when somebody doesn't understand what they're bidding and when somebody doesn't show up on time. And there's been times when somebody has shown up late and we've had to literally not hire them and we've hired somebody else that we somebody else that we've known because we do try out new people.

We don't want to stick with only the people that we know. Because what happens if you got to keep that competition up, man, you got to keep that competition up to keep the performance up, right? Or yet that but also, even in addition to that, what if, God forbid, the guy dies in a car wreck. You got to have to keep your options backups.

And so we are constantly trying and dabbing our toes in the water with other contractors, and sometimes they're just not very good and we've had to let them go. And that's not a fun, I really don't like being in that position. I'm not good.

It's not so hard that I enjoy that, and so I don't like that. I would say those are the top three things that I dislike about subcontractors. How do you handle, we'll say your first point there when someone doesn't show up, you mentioned reaming them out or whatever.

Let's play a scenario game here. You got a contractor, say he's a heating guy. You've worked with him for ten years, always put out, always performs.

He comes in on time with his bids and let's say one month during the winter, he's kind of stretched out and, you know, he's busy and he's starting to kind of fall short in some areas. What do you do? How do you handle that? Well, I just ask him point blank. I said, hey, what can I do to help you? I mean, how am I going to meet your schedule? Or how can I get you to show up on time or I want to work with people who I want to work with.

Right, right. What if he says, hey, man, we're so swamped, and I had two of my guys quit, they moved out of state, and I'm shorthanded right now, and I'm pulling all-nighters, and I just don't know if I'm going to be able to make that schedule. Well, then I would just ask them, well, who would you recommend to fill your spot? Because they know other HVAC guys.

Hey, I hear so and so has got a couple of openings. Yeah. And if they're recommending them, then you know they're going to be good.

Right. People know their own competition pretty well, right? Yeah, well, and generally they're seeing each other in the warehouse and supply house, whatever, and they're visiting and they're probably friendly, I think, most of the time. All the subcontractors get along really well.

Yeah, that's actually a good point. I want to dive in on that. I think there's this misconception as well.

You know what we should do? You could write this down, Mason. Write down some common misconceptions in the industry. I think that's a topic that we should probably visit at some point.

So I won't dive off too far here, but there is this common misconception that everyone is out there against each other, right. Like, oh, that's so and so from whatever electric. There are a bunch of, most people are very professional and courteous, believe it or not.

Believe it or not, there's actually good people in the world. There's sort of like, yeah, it is business, it is competition, but the teeth aren't out like people think they are. Most people are more than happy to work with other people or even give a recommendation.

Like you mentioned, I can think of a lot of subcontractors that I looked at when I was an electrician and thought, oh, yeah, that'd be a great company. I don't know a whole lot about them, but here's what I've noticed, or whatever. And then there's some that I haven't either.

There's some that say, I don't know if I could recommend them or whatever. Right. That's a common misconception.

I just wanted to dispel that most people are willing to work together. Yeah. There's a lot of times when somebody gets a really big job, they'll actually partner with one of their competitors.

Absolutely. I've actually done that before. Absolutely.

Well, in a nutshell, that's why we do the things that we do the way we do them, and that's why we've chosen that path of subbing our workout. That's right.