Mike Wandler - From Shop Floor to the Future of Energy | AI, Microreactors & Building the Biggest Machines on Earth

the first 50 years of L &H, we had 30 % turnover. started working on that and trying to change that when I took over as president. so I took over as president around 2000, 2012, it dropped to 3%. So I want Wyoming to do this.

It's not important if Wyoming does this. It's incredibly important that somebody in the United States of America does this. Because right now Russia's doing it and China's doing it. And a world filled with Russian and Chinese microreactors is not good for us Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show where we encourage and inspire the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have been there, done that, and are still getting it done, building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands, and their hustle.

I'm your host, Erick Loden. If you guys are enjoying the content, help me out. Like, share, follow, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube, social media, wherever you can find us. We are at From the Ground Up Show.

And if you guys haven't checked it out, make sure you check out our new merch store, shop.fromthegroundupshow.com. You can get some sweet coffee cups, tumblers, hats, sweatshirts, all kinds of stuff there.

Make sure you check it out. It's a lot of fun. So. uh Today, I am super excited.

I have a guest that has been recommended by a number of other guests and requested by quite a few of our listeners. I am joined today by Mike Wandler. Mike is the president of L and H. Industrial and also the CEO of Evercore Energy.

He is the founder of Wyoming's Innovative Entrepreneurs. L &H's mission is to move industries forward by designing, manufacturing, and maintaining the biggest machines on earth. So I'm sure you guys are excited to hear more about that. Mike has been innovative at L &H, combining a strong legacy in heavy equipment with new opportunities in sensing, data, AI, and energy innovation.

Evercore Energy does that through abundant, reliable energy solutions for heavy industry, including micro reactors and digitally optimized power systems. If that isn't enough, Mike is also an accomplished author, having authored two books. So Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Are you in the construction industry and super excited about the services you get from your material supplier?

Did your material supplier pay to take you on an all-inclusive vacation this year? Do you always have what you need, when and where you need it? If you answer no to any of those questions, make sure you check out MacArthur. MacArthurCo.

com. Give them a call and find the branch nearest you. top materials, the best prices, and only the best service, and ask them about their customer incentive trips. All right.

Well, we like to start every show just getting a little bit of background and learning about you and where you came from. So can you tell us a little bit about what life was like growing up? Thanks for having me, Erick. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm really excited. Just getting through that intro is kind of a mouthful. I know you've had quite a career and have your fingers in a lot of things. So we'll just dive right in.

I'm excited to learn more about you. Awesome. Yeah. So I was, I was born and raised in Gillette, Wyoming.

Uh, my dad had, uh, came there in the mid six, early sixties and he bought L and H industrial, uh, in 1964. He bought it from the guy that was running the shop. was called something else. Uh, and so I was there.

I was born in 68. I, grew up out on the, you know, was born on Ross down in Gillette, but we quickly moved out of town after Rawhide. So I grew up as a, not as a ranch kid, but as a manufacturing guy's kid. I liked tinkering with things at a young age.

And we moved out by Rosette and I started working because I didn't, didn't really like being out there on the ranch and not doing anything. I wanted to get to work early. So I started working when I was 14. and working in the shop, just cleaning chips, going down there after middle school and doing whatever they needed, just being the laborer.

And that was 82, so the oil crash happened right after that. And so I was involved in cleaning the shop and doing all these things. And then everybody was leaving and everything was just up in arms and I was getting minimum wage. And so they're like, hey, come over here.

started drilling holes and making parts. by the time I was 16, I was out doing field machining out in the field. And by the time I was 18, I was running the machine shop. Not because I was qualified, just because I was cheap and I was there and I was willing to show up and do the work.

So yeah, I worked with my dad and my brothers. Brother Lee, my brother Jeff, and it was a family company back then. There was a lot of shareholders. But yeah, I basically grew up in the shop and I loved it.

But born and raised in Gillette and started going global by the time I was 30. I really had my eye towards global even in the 80s. But by the end of the 90s, I was traveling. Uh, and really starting to, starting to think about the big world out there and how we could grow and diversify all in age.

So, yeah, that's hated, hated school. most entrepreneurs, you know, I went to school and things like that and I hated, hated it. I just wanted to go down and work and see much point in it. But so most of my education happened after.

So, uh, after I became president, so my, my dad, uh, had a. heart problem and he needed a heart transplant. So I ended up buying him out, me and my brothers and the other shareholders bought him out in 98. And then we bought my oldest brother out in 2000 and I became president.

So once I became president, I was fine up till then. mean, I... dropped out of high school about halfway through my senior year and got my GED. And no problem up until then.

I mean, I had everything, but then as soon as I was president and I'm sitting in these rooms, I'm like, oof, I need to know more than I know. So I went back and got a bachelor's degree in business administration. And that was great. That was great.

Then I felt like I was equipped to take on that part of my life. And then in 2007, I went to Harvard for owner president management program. And that was my first experience at a college in the dorms three weeks a year for three years in a row. And it was absolutely fantastic.

And I continue going to things like that. I'm just a voracious lifelong learner for things that I want to learn. But typical entrepreneur, terrible at school, love to work. I just worked my way through it all.

Okay, so sorry, I'm going to recap some of that. Just make sure I got the timeline right. So you actually dropped out of high school early and got your GED so that you could go into work. And it was when you were around 30 years old is when you went back to get a bachelor's degree.

Let me think about that. Yeah, I would have been 30. So about 2000 right in there. So yeah, I was born in 68.

So 32. Okay, okay, and where did you go to get that degree? So I did it all online because I was, I had the president job and I was, you I was swimming in it because I was not qualified to do it. So I did it all online on nights and weekends and, uh, just worked my neck off.

probably a part of why I got divorced that second time. But yeah, I I was just in the books for, think, I think it took me two and a half years to get through that. And, say you would self study, right? They'd send you the books, you'd self study.

And then he went down to the library and did a supervised test for each book, which was easy on some of them, but not the law books. The law books were really dense. But, uh, but I, I had a, you know, I was terrible at school in high school. They were, were going to, one of my teachers told me he was going to flunk me out of the.

high school and there was no way I was going to do another year. That's why I just said screw it and quit and got my GED. But it's different when you're learning what you want to learn, right? I can really get into it when it's something that applies and I know I'm going to use it.

I hate being told what to do. oh man, yeah, and you were moving pretty fast if you're uh running a company developing into international markets and then also doing a bachelor's degree in two and a half years. You're chugging through that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I get onto something, I have to, because if I don't focus on it and just get it out, I don't finish it. So I usually really put my heart and soul into it to get it done quickly and stay on it. That's great. I think that's probably true of a lot of entrepreneurs.

We got a little bit of that ADD, ADHD thing going on. And if it's interesting, we can focus and get a lot done. But if it's not interesting, we're not going to finish it. Yeah, I'm a big quick start.

I don't know if you follow any Colby stuff, but my Colby is 4386. um I'm a big quick start, but my follow through is not that great. So I have a ton of people around me that do all the follow through. I do the quick start stuff and the new shiny things and get them going.

And then I have a whole team of follow through people that will take it and turn it into a real business. That's great. That's awesome. And I think you're the second guest we've had that went through one of those programs at Harvard.

I don't know if it was the same program or not, but can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, was it Clifford that went through it? Will you talk to Clifford? Brian Gottlieb is who I was talking to.

he ran a home improvement and primarily bath and window company out of Wisconsin, I believe, but, um, it's yeah, was. Cliff roots. only back when I got done, there was three people that had, that had went through the OPM Harvard program and Cliff root was one of them. I can't remember who the other lady was, but she was no longer with us.

But, uh, it is a fantastic program and I would recommend it to any entrepreneur. They, have a slot limit and this is, this is dated information. This is back in 2007. They have a slot limit of, of, you need to be a major owner.

So they like you to have 50 % of the company. Uh, uh, and they like it to be a privately held company. There's another program for publicly held companies, but OPM is for privately held. You're a major owner and you're a president.

And then you apply. And, I didn't think I would get in, uh, because I'm a high school dropout, right? And I got this chinky, uh, degree from Kennedy Western university. when I was 30, but it was all online.

But I went there and I met them and we hit it off. So they let me in. I had to take a few classes to get up to speed, but it was fantastic. basically what they do is they take their MBA program and they say, okay, if you're running a company successfully, five million to $200 million company.

You can condense that because you obviously have a lot of these basic things and you've got a lot of experience. But what an entrepreneur is usually missing are these things. So they bring you there, they put you in a dorm and they work you like a dog. I was getting up at 6 a.

m. and going to bed at midnight. And you would get like one or two days off in that process. But other than that, you were just flat out, if you wanted to absorb it all, right?

If you wanted to get the most out of it. It's a real stretch, it changed my whole trajectory on my life. So I would highly recommend it for anybody. Funny story, when I talked to my partners into paying for it, for me, know, funding it and letting me take three weeks paid to go do it, I thought it was a one year thing.

And was like 20 grand, which was a tremendous amount of money back then. was just like, how dare you ask to use 20 grand and have three weeks off. And uh when I got there, I realized that, this is a three year thing and it's 20 grand per year. Right.

so I had some explaining to do when I came back that, by the way, I'm going to be asking for that again next year. Yeah, it was, was amazing. I was, I was ending it in 20, 2009 at the, the, uh, financial crash, the housing market crash. And they, Harvard brought in, we were right in the beginning of that and it was just mayhem.

Uh, nobody knowing what the future was going to look like. And they brought in all of the leading experts that were responsible for that in banks and in the government. it. really underlined the fact that these guys are not in control of anything.

They really, I they could kind of tell you there's like these 40 factors. And if these things happen, then this will happen. And if these things happen, this will happen. But they're not, they're not in control and they're not in charge.

They're just in the position that they're supposed to be. And it's impossible for them to do the job they've been tasked with. So, yeah, it's nature taking its course, right? That was a good lesson.

It was a good thing to learn. I've made a lot of money because of the relationships I had with those people. I got into a really ugly fight with my partner in South Africa. We owned a machine shop in South Africa building gears.

We bought into it about 2003. And my partner was a Dutch South African and he was just a maniac. Got to where I couldn't work with him. You he was, was just kept jacking his price up because he was mad that we were making money above and beyond what he was making, but he wasn't sharing any of his money.

So it just didn't make any sense. But anyway, uh, we broke up and then he was just like, you're, going away and you're, you know, you have no rights here. Good luck. Right.

You just, I'm taking your shares. And so I emailed my Harvard OPM. 38 group and asked them, has anybody dealt with this? Do you know what you're doing?

I had five people say, yep, he can't do that. I know exactly what to do. I'll get on your board. I'll introduce you to my attorneys.

I'll hold your hand and walk you through it. And so instead of getting $0 out of that deal, I got, I think we got $2 million settled. Wow. So those kind of connections are incredibly valuable.

And uh I know Harvard gets picked on, and they deserve it for some of the stuff that they get picked on, like taking taxpayer dollars when they have so many billions of their own. But as far as going to a school to teach you some incredible things and be surrounded by amazing students and amazing staff on the business side, they're a... They're amazing. I love MIT too.

I spend a lot of time at MIT now. Okay. MIT fits Wyoming a little more because it's minds and hands, I think they call it. So they like doing the work.

ah But they're both excellent. If anybody can go to either one of those and learn anything that you're interested in, pay the money. Go do it. It will pay.

It'll give you incredible dividends. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, that that leads into one of my next questions was with your experience diving into the workforce, straight or in high school, and then postponing college till later in life and kind of going to get your college education after you had realized a particular interest and a particular need. How has that shaped your view of education?

What advice would you have for the high school student trying to figure out? what they want to do with their life. Should they pursue a college education at all costs or should they get involved in the workforce and figure out where they want to go? What are your thoughts there?

Yeah, so the best advice is to do a Colby Clifton imprint, figure out your unique abilities and your passions. And a parent should do this with their kid around 10 or 12. Help figure out what that kid's current unique abilities and passions are. I love tradesmen, so we'll talk about tradesmen in a different way where you don't have to test them to figure this out.

If you've got a kid that he probably doesn't like school or isn't good at it, but you see him working on his bicycle, know, motorcycles, things apart, putting them back together. That's a tradesman. So what we're looking for and the world is looking for in tradesmen is people that like to fix things and make things. engineering type of people.

Now that right now is the, the, the highest paying job, but don't go after a job because of, because it pays first stop and figure out your unique abilities and passions. And you can do Colby Clifton print stuff. And, uh, once you know your, your unique abilities and passion, then go into AI and say, all jobs would this Colby Clifton and print? well, all jobs what I love and see which ones pop out for that kid, right?

And there's going to be a lot of them that, you know, the pop out and then tell them, okay, you're to have to choose, you know, narrow it and choose. And it's not a permanent choice. Tell them that, right? It's not a permanent choice.

It's just, what are you going to do first? What are you going to do for the next 10 years? You know, you need to make a commitment. And, uh, but if you did that with, with the kids, or if they do that for themselves, they will, they will land on a job that doesn't feel like they should even be getting paid for it because it's so easy and they love doing it.

And they just happen to know that it's worth $100,000 a year. So they get that money to be able to do something they love. And then the second piece of that is make sure that you go into a tribe of like-minded people. make sure that you like the mission.

I would say, first of all, create your own business. And this is... This is going to happen going forward because of AI. A lot of people are going to just create their own business and be their own entrepreneurs.

that an entrepreneur is the freest person in the world. So I would wish that on everybody. Again, it's not for everybody. Check and see if that's for you.

But if it is for you, man, just do that. It's wonderful. But uh if it's not, get very clear on your unique abilities and passions and go into that field. And I wrote a book on the know thyself, love thyself, which is, which kind of covers this whole concept of starting out with, with mental fitness, mental resilience.

And then you go into this unique ability and then you figure out how to drop into flow and the flow state. can call it what you want the zone, whatever you want to call it. It's, it's when time warps. That's how most people know that they're in it is the day went by quickly or really slow.

And, and if once you experience flow, you're, you're not going to want to do anything that's not in flow. You keep looking for that. And then if you're working for a company and you have a great leader, a great leader that's been properly trained can get the group into flow. So whatever the group is, and then then that's a whole nother level.

So personal flow is amazing and you can get to that by yourself. Group flow takes a great leader and it's, it's beautiful to watch. Yeah. Yeah.

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You said your dad purchased the business in the 60s. When did it originally start? Yeah, I don't know when that building started, but it was just a small machine shop and the guy that ran it wasn't paying his bills. So it went into receivership and I believe the bank came and said, Hey, anybody working here want to buy this?

So dad went and borrowed some money from his relatives and bought the shop. was just a small little garage machine shop working on drilling rigs, but dad was running it. So, and then he renamed it LNH industrial because it was Leon was my dad's name. And then Hank Barney was his, his welding.

guy that was going to run the welding side and help him run the business. Cause that really didn't want to do the welding stuff. really liked the machine. And yeah, it started and they were, it was a boom.

It was, that was a oil and gas boom. And dad was working on grilling rigs. And. uh So they were as boomed as rolling in cash from the sixties all the way through the seventies.

so they were rolling in so much cash that they built a brand new building out in the field, north of Gillette out in the middle of nowhere, out by the fishing lake. And now it's surrounded by town, but then it was the middle of nowhere. And they actually did develop it. They developed land.

So they had this huge beautiful building and I... I started there uh pushing promotion around the floor and helping the contractors doing electrical work and things as they built that building. So I was there to help build a building and then to move all the equipment and move all the stuff from the old side of town to the new side of town. And I didn't know what was going on.

I was 14, but then we no sooner got the machines moved over there and the work dried up. They had built this, this, shop to handle like, I'll get the number wrong, but it was like 12 derricks could move it. It could be sent into this shop and it was all designed for the drilling and it was gone. I mean, literally the day they opened it, all that work disappeared, the oil crash.

And there, I mean, the most we ever saw in there after that was probably two derricks through the eighties a little bit, but we, we had to pivot to mining. So all my dad's employees had gotten hired by the mines to come out and start doing the coal mining and start the maintenance shops at the coal mines. And there was no services in Gillette. I mean, we were one of the few.

There was no field machining. I helped dad. He took a model error and turned it into a portable boring machine to go out and line bore. And I cut my teeth running that portable boring machine.

Remember being out at one of the mines and they realized how young I was and the safety guy of course was like, no, you can't be here. know, they, cause they took me in the office to dad's friend and, dad, his friend called him and was chewing him out and like, you can't have this 16 year old kid out here. Dad said, okay, well have him pack the stuff up and send them in because I don't have anybody else to do it. And so I got a pass.

I got a pass to stay out there. That's awesome. man I cut my teeth in the mining. My oldest brother Lee, he cut his teeth in the oil field.

So he stayed in the oil field. And one of the reasons we bought him out is he didn't want to do the mining stuff. He wanted to work on pumping units. And so he took the old shop and set up Marlin Oil and he still owns oil wells, fixes oil wells, he does that stuff.

But that's why Lee left for the oil field stuff. We still do oilfield work, but it's oil mining mostly. then there's some oilfield work that comes in the shop that we do and we love it. Love those customers, they're great legacy customers.

But most of our work is now in surface mining. the mines and then the railroad came in the 90s and we started working on maintenance away equipment for BNSF. Designing, we put real engineers in and... We were always, we always had shade tree engineers and my dad was a great shade tree engineer, but then we formalized it and had a whole engineering department.

And then, then we just kept going out further and further and different mines. And then NASA, I don't know if you saw the Artemis rocket shoot off, but we, we've worked on the NASA crawler transporter. We do a lot of work for NASA, lot of work for Blue Origin and Lots of mineral processing and aggregate work. Wind, we work on wind shafts.

Everything's in big mining equipment or big, largest equipment in the world, but it's all machining, mechanic, and welding field service. It's been a great ride. Yeah. So that was one of my questions.

know part of your mission statement is that you work on the largest machines on earth. being here close by, Gillette, I've gotten to see a glimpse into some of those. for our listeners that maybe you're not exposed to mining and NASA, the space shuttle you mentioned and some of the things you do, can you help us understand, I mean, how big are these machines? What kind of machines do you build?

Yeah, so the biggest machine, well, let's talk about the NASA crawler transporter because a lot of people know what that is. They've seen it. That's the machine that's carried the rockets out to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center since the original rockets and it just, it took all the space shuttles out and now the SLS rocket. That thing's an undercarriage off a walking drag line from the fifties.

That's what it was. That's what the design was off of. It was built by Marion Power Shovel. So it is the size of, you could put four houses on top of that machine.

And we upgraded it for the SLS rocket needed to handle 6 million more pounds than it was equipped for. So I think, I think it's in the 23 million. Yeah, it's. Tremendous.

It's a tremendous machine. that's not the biggest machines we work on. We work on drag lines, walking drag lines, which are like a skyscraper or walking around and digging dirt. And uh then some of the fixed plant stuff would be just enormous buildings with enormous equipment in them.

So the pinions that we manufacture can be three feet in diameter and eight feet long. the track pads that we manufacture for the oil sands, to keep those machines from sinking into the oil sands. They're 15 feet long and two foot bread loaf and there's hundreds of them on one of those machines. So these are monster machines.

So the world has... A lot of big equipment that needs maintained and a lot of it's custom like the NASA crawler transporter. There's two of them. They're both at NASA.

Whenever you're doing big mineral processing at a gold mine or a copper mine, you have massive equipment. Or if you're working on drag lines or shovels, those are all equipment that's the size of a house. So you build the parts that you can in a shop because the shop conditions are more controlled and nicer. And then you send them to the field with field crews and you assemble them there and build them out.

So the NASA crowd transport parts, was 1,300 of them built in Sheridan and Gillette, all sent to Kennedy Space Center. And then our field crew went down there for two years, took all the old parts off, re-machined and refit. the bores and installed all the new parts and ran test the machine. it was, you know, was, that's what we do for all of these machines.

we, so the, you know, we compete with people like Kat, Komatsu, FL Schmidt, all the big guys, but those are $15 billion companies that build the machines. They get tired of them, right? So if there's, if there's a, buy each other all the time and then there's these machines that there's not enough of them for them to take care of. But if you own a crawler transporter and it's a hundred million dollar machine, you'd rather spend 14 million fixing it and upgrading it, then you would buy a brand new one for a hundred million.

And you run into that across the entire globe. But you do have to sell. globally to feed, we got 250 people in the US and 250 people internationally, so we have to sell globally to keep that many people busy. Yeah.

And you guys are, how many countries or continents are you on? Aren't you on like six continents or something now? Yeah. So as far as shops, we've got shops in gelatin, Sheridan and in Phoenix, there's LMH Mexico.

There's two shops down there for the do, uh, rebuilds and retrofits and upgrades. And then there's one shop in AnaVacosta, Chile. And then we've got, uh, we've got offices in Canada. we, had the place in South Africa.

We don't have any more thing there anymore. And we had places two different times in, in Australia, we don't have anything there anymore, but we sell to all of those places. We sell to Brazil. So it's, you you go where the customers are, wherever they need you.

And usually when you can set up service and support, you'll sell more parts. Service and support is the hard part. It's really tough to staff it and to maintain it. Yeah.

man, those are, that's a broad reach from some pretty humble beginnings in Gillette, Wyoming. Um, so. didn't think we would be able to do it, but we tried and it wasn't as hard as it should have been. Because a lot of that is people trust companies from the United States and then they especially trust people from Wyoming.

You know, there's some States in the United States that people aren't known to be that trustworthy, but Wyoming, you're a cowboy, you're a man of your word. You'll do what you say you're going to do. And that's, that's actually very unusual in the world. So the fact that the USA has that is, is incredible.

It has that reputation worldwide is incredible. then the fact that Wyoming has even a little higher reputation of that is, incredible. So it's, it's actually great to be from Wyoming and sell globally. I would hope that any entrepreneur in Wyoming, and I tell my Wyoming innovative entrepreneurs, this is yes, be a Wyoming.

majority-owned company and headquartered in Wyoming and be at least national, but I would prefer to be global because the markets ebb and flow and maybe this is because of my scars from being so young and seeing the market pulled out from under you so many times. We're arguably over diversified. But I'd rather be over diversified than under diversified ah when it's slow. When it's busy, that's no sense in all the diversification we have.

You'd be way better off financially to focus. But when it gets slow, there's always a customer somewhere that's busy that it's like, yeah, come over here. If you've got resources, bring them over here. We'll do all of the stuff we've been wanting to do.

And that works. That works. Now, where's the fine line on that? I don't know.

It changes all the time. But you shouldn't any customer that's over 15 % of your sales. And less than that's better. Yeah, yeah, there's some huge wisdom there.

I know we discussed with the previous guest that there's nobody more arrogant than an entrepreneur that stumbled onto a booming market and hasn't hit a downturn yet. They think that they can do no wrong and they're going to make money forever and then the market crashes. I've seen many of them and I've been that guy once or twice. once you've been through that a few times, you're like, yeah, this money printing machine will end.

oh About the time that everybody's saying it won't end, that's right towards the end of it. anybody can make money in an in-demand industry when the market's booming. It's the people that know how to keep it when the market turns that really show success. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, go through a few cycles and then then you're a real business entrepreneur, right? You gotta go through a few cycles. Yeah, good stuff. Well, I know we mentioned it in your intro.

You've recently launched uh Evercore as well. How do L &H and Evercore fit together? Is one a subsidiary of the other? Are they independent businesses?

How does that work? So Evercore is a subsidiary of LNH Industrial and it's my latest crazy idea. Actually, it's a few years old now. I decided that my life's purpose was to innovate energy.

It just came to me that, you we've got a serious energy problem going on and I saw it coming. And that's what my latest book is on is innovate energy. So my life's purpose is to innovate energy. So I went to work trying to figure out, what's the best way for me to do that?

And of course I manufacture and I work on a lot of parts for energy. So we do that already. And so that's the L and H side is the parts for energy. You know, we're in coal, oil, gas.

We, we work on wind things. We would rebuild power plants. We do all of these things to help them. keep their machines running and advance the energy.

Hydro dams is big for us. We do a lot of hydro dam work to refresh all the hydro dams and improve the efficiency of them. So that was covered under LMH. I was at a meeting with VWXT and one of the Trona mines and I was there as the manufacturer, right?

That was the local guy that was there to support and. try to get micro reactors into the Toronto Mines. And I saw them talking back and forth and they wanted the reactor. These guys wanted to sell the reactor.

The Toronto mine wanted to buy the reactor, but nobody wanted to own it. And you know, I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm like, wait a minute, why don't you want to own it? And they told me, and I'm like, well, sounds like a good business opportunity. How about I own it?

And... uh They're like, yeah, that would be great. So you figure out how to do that. We would love you to own that.

So I headed down that road and working with governor Gordon, working with Wyoming energy authority and, thinking about this, it came to me that owning the micro reactors, if Wyoming, if we could have a Wyoming based company that owned micro reactors and I'm talking about 10 megawatt, maybe 20 megawatt micro reactors. and you had fleets of them. So you'd buy a billion dollars a year worth of them and you would lease them to my customers, these mining customers, any mineral processing customers, anybody that's remote, that's at the end of the power line, and they're the first ones that are going to get cut off as this energy boom is happening.

So that's already happening now. So you would prefer to be able to put a mine or mineral processing anywhere in the world so that you could pick the best ore deposit, right? And then if you're constrained by power because there's no more power to sell, you need power. So you're going put in a power plant.

Well, do you have coal near you or gas near you or something else? You need power that's on. Well, a nuclear microreactor is a very elegant solution. And I knew that because my father-in-law that lived in Sundance, Jerry Schloret, he ran microreactors for the Navy in Antarctica and in Panama.

And he was just, him and his friends were just beside themselves that we had stopped doing that in the seventies after they had proven that it worked. So I knew that this could be done. And I'd talked to the guys that did it. So I started focusing on that and I didn't want to build them because I could already see there was lots of people, BWXT.

mean, they're the best at building micro reactors have been doing it for the Navy forever. Like I see radiant came in, lots of people dogpiling on building them. So I'm like, I will build parts for you. So I want to build parts for BWXT for radiant for all of these other micro reactor companies from L and H.

And then I want to own those micro reactors. I want to have that company. uh, stock in Wyoming for the long run and adding a billion dollars a year with the reactors that are sold to great customers globally. So you have this evergreen, paycheck coming back to Wyoming because you're constantly leasing these, and these reactors will last 20 years, 60 years, a hundred years maybe.

And you can actually be the energy capital of the world. Wyoming and the United States, it's not, I love Wyoming. So I want Wyoming to do this. It's not important if Wyoming does this.

It's incredibly important that the United, somebody in the United States of America does this. Because right now Russia's doing it and China's doing it. And a world filled with Russian and Chinese microreactors is not good for us for two reasons. One is they don't care about life.

They don't care about whether they pollute the world. They just don't care, right? They look at killing people way different than we do or polluting the earth way different than we do. The second one is you don't want that revenue stream.

going to a non-free country. You you want it in your country, right? You want it in your country. So for a matter of national security, I want that done.

I'm not sure if I'm the right person to do it. Actually, even at a billion dollars a year worth of microreactors, you could have a hundred of these companies doing the same thing and not be in each other's way. So this is a total abundance play. It's complete subsidiary of L &H.

I'd hired Marcio, his bread offer a couple of years to help me with it. And then I realized that it's not ready. I don't have any micro reactors to sell. So he went off to do something else because he needs to get on with his stuff.

And I decided to just wait. It's still active. I'm still promoting it. The book I wrote, Know Thyself, Love Thyself, or the book I wrote on that, Innovate Energy, just dropped and it outlines that.

And you'd say, well, why are you doing that? Because you're just letting your playbook out. Because this needs to happen for the good of the United States. And if I can do it and I can put it together for Wyoming, awesome.

If somebody else does it. A hundred other people do it in the USA. That's awesome too. It just needs to happen.

There needs to be great leadership and this is the way to do it. So if you were doing, if you did this and I love oil and gas and hydro and all of these other energies, there's a place for all of them. This one could be owned by Wyoming. Some people will say, the micros aren't going to be competitive.

Okay. That's, that's true. They're going to cost more than an SMR or a big light water reactor, but they're going to be super competitive when you're in remote area and you don't have enough demand for an SMR or, or you don't, you can't connect to the big light water. they're, they're not a competition for anywhere.

You're going to have SMRs like TerraPower. it kind of made sense in the Toronto mines because they don't have a lot of other options, but Anyway, it's more for remote stuff. So that's what I'm doing. And I think I'm going to have reactors ready.

I'm already on the list with quite a few companies that want me to own them once they sell them. But they aren't close to sell. It's close enough to sell them for me to engage and hire somebody else to run after it yet. But as soon as they are, then I'll explore and I'll hire somebody to follow through with it.

And I'll round up the money and it'll It'll round up the people to operate them, start buying them. I'll start working with Wyoming to get this anchored in Wyoming. So my thought of that is there's always this worry that worries us in Wyoming because we don't have to pay our own taxes. The minerals pay our taxes, right?

So if you could do this for 10 or 15 years. then you would have something to pivot to to tax if you needed to. If the minerals wouldn't pay our taxes anymore, you would at least have a highly profitable company that you could pivot and tax to take care of that. have that be a plan for the long-term of Wyoming for a lot of different reasons.

The main reason is it's a matter of national security. This needs to be done. Awesome. Well, I want to dive into the nuclear and understand that a little bit better.

But I mean, we've already covered, you guys do large mining equipment. You're dabbling in nuclear. You've built stuff for NASA. You have the crawler.

And I understand you guys built some parts for the Artemis 2 that's up exploring the moon right now. What is the type of equipment or the aspect of your business that you find most exciting? What are you most interested in or what is the most fun to work on? Anything new.

So I'm a quick start. So I like the new things that will significantly improve, where we're at or, or, or just to learn something new, but it needs to be something where there's revenue, there's profit to be, to be generated. So it needs to be somewhere where we're not going into a market that's full of people that are doing fine. It's something that, that needs to be done being ignored by others or.

or is just underserved and we can move the needle in a significant way for our customers. So we have a compelling offer and we can be profitable at it, right? We're past working for free on purpose. We'll do that enough on accident.

We don't want to do it on purpose, So the new stuff that I'm focused on right now, The NQA one you mentioned, so we got tangled in with all of these nuclear guys for quite a few years now. The BWXT guys brought us an incredible opportunity to make parts for this power plant. And we're in the middle of still negotiating that contract with the lawyers. The lawyers are trying to screw it up, but I think we'll get that one landed.

But in that process, we decided to get our nuclear quality assurance. That's what NQA stands for. We decided to get our nuclear quality assurance program in place. So we hired a guy and he came in and did a beautiful job helping my guys, Paul and Gary set up a nuclear quality assurance plan.

We have... We hired one person, we got Paul moving over there and we have two others that we moved over there, Paul and Gary and Russ, into a building. was actually an LG apparatus shop that we had bought many years ago and sits right on our campus in Gillette. So we allocated that building.

We're refurbishing and putting walls in because it needs to be secure. the people having these parts done don't want them mixed in with the... the ISO level parts, which is another quality program. So your ISO level stuff and your NQA level stuff will be in a separate building and the people will be over there.

I'll be over there with them for the foreseeable future just to get this up and going. yeah, we'll be, we're right now ready to take business for nuclear quality assurance, which means that it's radiated components. Before with our ISO, we could work on non-radiated components, which when you look at a nuclear power plant, there's plenty of non-radiated components, plenty of stuff you don't need NQA for. But anything that's radiated, now you have to have nuclear quality assurance level and it's a bugger, it's a big lift.

And I would love everybody in Wyoming to jump in and do this too. I want Wyoming to be the place you go to buy parts for nuclear energy. that's a especially in SMRs and in microreactors, that's a brand new industry. I've never been around when you had an opportunity to be at the ground floor of creating a brand new manufacturing industry.

And then along with that, the old light water reactors, which they're going to build more new ones. You might as well enter that as well, because it's the same certifications. That's my dream is to help, you know, I'm going to set L and H up, but while I'm doing that, I'm going to share what I'm doing with other entrepreneurs, innovative entrepreneurs in Wyoming so that they too can come along. And then my word of warning is it's very expensive.

You know, I talked about a building. talked about four people. talked about a certification program or a program put in place that costs, I think it was 250,000. I think.

Now this work will be higher margin work. So somebody that's the same part in ISO and then you do it in NQA, you're to be able to target multiple times more for the NQA one because of the pedigree and the tracking. But I think you would need, you'll definitely need millions of dollars worth of work lined up to bother paying for the registration and the, you know, having that in your... building and having your people distracted by it.

And then the other thing we learned is you can't put it in with your ISO program. It will eat the lunch of your ISO program. And then you'll only be doing MQA1 work. That's why it works.

The higher the level program you put in, it swallows all the lower level stuff. And that's okay if you don't care about that old work, but we do. We care dearly about that old work. So we firewall between the two.

to where this doesn't swallow that and it's separate people and it's separate planning and separate hats that you put on when you're doing it. So it's important to keep it separate, not try to mix it in. It's important that you can see millions of dollars worth of revenue that some customers telling you, yes, if you would go get that, I will give you this work. And the way they're telling you that should be that they're bringing you other non-nuclear work.

and you've got a relationship with them, right? Not a guess or a passing. Yeah, I'd give you work because everybody says that, Yeah, absolutely. If they can get somebody else to make their investment for them, why not?

that goes back to the diversification you were talking about earlier, making sure you're in multiple markets and having your bases covered there. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. Go ahead.

I was going say you've mentioned a couple different levels of kind of nuclear power and different size systems. For the novice that maybe isn't familiar with that, can you help us understand what size are we talking about? What counts as a micro reactor? What kind of application would there be for that?

Yeah. So the light water reactor, and I'm probably getting these terms wrong, but the, I hear normally called a light rod reactor was your grandfather's reactor. It's, the one that you see the big smoke stack, right? It's not smoke, it's steam, but you see the big stack and it's a huge, huge machine putting out what a gigawatt of power.

SMRs look a lot smaller and a lot more elegant. look more like a normal power plant like WYODAK And they're putting out 250, 500 megawatts of energy. So you need three of those, two or three of those. You'll need three of those to make up the big ones, right?

So you got the huge ones and then you got the medium sized ones. They're still fixed plant, but you can build them modularly so that everybody's wanting to build them modularly, which means you build them in a factory the size that you can haul. Then you haul them to site and you put them together and do as much work as you can in the factory. And then you have a micro and a micro is some people still build them for fixed plant.

I would love if micro meant that it could be hauled on a semi. That would be my definition. That's the one I'm looking for. I want the micro reactor that I could.

holl it on a semi, I don't care if it takes four semis, but holl them on a semi, quickly assemble them on site and not have fixed plant equipment and be able to just set it up, not have things buried and be able to move that. What I want, I don't know if you've seen the Pele that BWXT delivered, but it's a mobile microreactor. that the military can use to put it forward positions when they're fighting conflicts and keep the power on. And that's because the compelling reason for that is half of the deaths in a military conflict are people hauling fuel to the generators to power those forward positions.

So if you put a microreactor there, there's nobody hauling fuels. You remove half the deaths in those conflicts. So that's fascinating. But yeah, I want to be able to move them.

I want to be able to move them in and there's a problem with moving them while they're fueled. So that's fine. If I could at least have an option to move them on a refuel. So that would be what every five or 10 years when it's ready to refuel.

they no longer need that energy at that site, I would love the option to move it to a different site to continue using that piece of equipment. And that's what I'm dreaming of and then not have this big fixed plant thing. That's the ones I'm looking at investing in because then I can move them in. So a mine starts, you move in, let's say 10 megawatts or maybe two fives because you never want one.

So maybe two, five megawatts. And then as the mine grows, you just keep adding them and stacking them on as it needs more and more megawatts. And then as the mine life starts going down, or maybe they get better things, they don't need all that energy, you start taking them away and moving them toward where they're needed. That, to me is a microreactor, but I would qualify that with saying a lot of the, everybody starts out with that design and it's really hard and it's really expensive.

And they end up with what looks more like an SMR, fixed plant that you're never going to move to another location. Which means that you better. You better be sure that you're going to need that power long enough to at least pay for it, which would be 20 years, 30 years. There's an interesting problem coming.

And that is the cost of the power. So we're running a bunch of energy that was put in, what, 30 to 60 years ago. And that's in coal and nuclear and all of us. We put it in 30 or 60 years ago.

Well, imagine a house that you bought 30 or 60 years ago. You you probably paid 15 or 30 grand for it. And now you're living in it and you paid off the fixed equipment long ago, right? You still got your maintenance, but you paid off the thing years ago.

So that's what we have in all the power plants. We have stuff that the setup was paid off years ago. Now we want to reset up. Now the new house, instead of costing 15 grand to build, is going to cost $500,000 to build.

Power plants are the same way. The new ones are going to cost tremendously more than the old ones because of inflation. Then nobody wants to pay that bill. So everybody's doing this and they're freaking out about, you know, this and that and the other, but it's, they just trying to avoid having to pay the bill for the new house.

And, uh, they're not, there's no way you're going to be able to avoid it. Could you peanut butter across all the taxpayers? Yeah. But the taxpayers are the same people that are rate payers.

So, you know, that's the, that's the problem that, that, uh, the world, the United States is facing right now. is uh we got to build a lot of power and it's going to cost a lot more than it used to and nobody's going to like the new price for that power. So they're looking for ways to make that not true. that's like saying, let's make inflation not true.

That works. I've seen some stuff in the news lately about there's a few startup companies out there that are trying to get the micro reactors. And what I was reading was they were talking about, you know, putting a micro reactor, a couple micro reactors for each kind of town and moving the whole power grid towards nuclear in a small state. And you're saying you don't think that's feasible.

That's going to be far more expensive. The primary value of these micro reactors is going to be more remote locations or more industrial locations. Yeah, absolutely. You're not going to compete with a large reactor with a small reactor.

If you've got a place that can absorb the energy from a gigawatt, you need a light water reactor. If you have a place that can absorb 350 megawatts, you need a terapower-natrium reactor. You can take the smaller one, but you're going to pay a lot more per kilowatt hour. for that smaller one.

there's a place for all of them and the place for the smallest ones are where you don't have the options of grid power. Grid power is so affordable and so amazing. The people that dreamed up that You know, all of those old power plants and all of the grid and the co-op systems were amazing. And they're still amazing.

They're, they're cooperatives, right? They're, they're, they're owned by the users. It's, it's a, it's an amazing system. There's a few problems with it, but mostly it's amazing.

And, uh, we need to keep using that where it makes sense. Now, is it vulnerable? Yes, it's vulnerable. It's vulnerable because it's a The grid goes down and the grid really needs to be refreshed and updated.

And I'm not an expert of that. I just know enough to be dangerous, but I know our U S grid is the largest machine in the world. And we don't really know, what, what's going to happen when we throw a few more gigawatts on it, right? It's, we know it's not going to be good.

So there's a lot of smart people working on it. And it's going to, again, it's the largest machine in the world. So guess what? It's going to take a ton of money to fix it.

And somebody is going to have to pony up that money. It's probably going to be the American taxpayer, which by the way, is the middle class. That's who pays for all this stuff. So how much can they afford?

Will they afford? Yeah. You don't want, what you're going to see, I think in the next five and 10 years is. rolling brown outs and then some blackouts that we're not used to.

We're used to the power always being there. We just flip the switch, it's always there. You're gonna see that is not true in the future and it's gonna be because of, know, grid, it's gonna be because of lack of power. It's gonna be for various different reasons that there are people focusing on.

And the good news is we will fix it, but not without. Not without pain and suffering of rolling brownouts and blackouts that we're not used to in the USA. And not without the energy costing two or three times more than it is today. Okay.

Interesting. Energy is important though. Energy is the most important thing that we have to focus on. is for the next 10 or 20 years, it's going to be the thing.

And China is kicking our ass on energy. have put on a massive amount of energy. and energy is what makes the economy roar. We got to get on with building it.

So what are they doing to uh increase their energy output as quickly as they have? How does their system compare to ours? So they're doing everything and because they're communist, Chinese communist party, they don't have to find the money. They don't have to ask anybody.

They just decide at a high level that we're going to add nuclear power plants. then whoever's in the way, get out of the way. Bulldozers are coming. Maybe we'll build you a shack over here.

They're not free. all of this stuff. And I love, would prefer free, I would never change our USA system for theirs. But the truth is theirs, they just, you know, the federal government says we're doing it and it's bulldozers and get the hell out of the way and they start putting them up.

so it's an efficient system where we have, we try to get it done by private industry, which we should. And that takes longer, all the negotiations and how much are you paying private industry? How much does the government have to pay? We don't want to pay anything, but honestly, we have to pay to get this going.

And then, and then you just have to start negotiating with the NIMBY, you know, the, you can't put it here. China doesn't deal with that. There's nobody, nobody would dare say you can't put that here. You can't say that over there.

You don't have that choice. It's just, no, it's, it's going there. And I don't care how long you're. how many generations this farm has been in your family.

We're putting a reactor there tomorrow. So that's why we can move faster. And they did. So we really didn't need power.

We had all the power we needed in the 70s. And then we've been pretty flatlined since then. And it hasn't been a problem. So I was born in 68, right?

We've been flat on power since 1970s. We've got a lot of other efficiencies that we put in. So we were just spoiled and fat dumb and happy. And now it's come home to roost that we have to, you know, we have to put reliable energy and we have to increase the capacity.

And some of that's being driven by AI. A lot of it's being driven by AI servers, but chip plants coming back home, each one of those chip plants takes the same energy as an entire state. You know, that So bringing that kind of stuff back to the USA, which I think we're all in favor of, okay, you not only bring that, but now you got to bring the power source to feed it with power. And it needs to be clean and reliable.

And it needs not to cost the middle class anything if you can help that, right? So what you see them doing now is the people that are building chip plants. They're just buying their own power. They're bringing their own power.

It's amazing. You wouldn't have thought that two years ago, but they're all like, yeah, we're buying our own power. We're going to bring it. Which is great.

That's a way that the price of that power ends up on the company that's selling that product. So it ends up being in that product for those that choose to buy it rather than ended up on the taxpayers, no matter if they decided to use that stuff or not. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the beauty of uh commercialism and, or capitalism rather is, man, corporate America solves problems. If they need power and they don't have it, they're going to build it. So. And it's happening right now.

And, and I'm just proud to have a little small piece of it and, you know, know enough about it to try to, to try to peel off some of it and, help, help the fight. Right. So do you foresee that being a potential market for some of the micro reactors and things that you guys are getting into? Somebody setting up a micro reactor to power just a big industrial facility or to supplement power for one of these chip plants or things like that?

is it still too expensive for that application? No, they'll pay the, they'll pay for it. they, yo, you'll see it in remote areas or you'll see it at you. You would see it at a, at a plant like the ones down in the Trona mines.

So somebody that's at the end of the line and the person that's supplying them power really doesn't want to, they're, they're generating their own power right now, but they don't like generating their own power. They want the simpler, easier solution. I don't think you're going to see that. very prominent until the mid 2030s because what's going to have to happen is somebody's going to have to pay for the first of a kind and it's going to be very expensive and then they're going to have to be the nth of a kind, right?

So I believe when you start building and this is whether it's SMRs or microreactors. when you start building, let's say even 25 a year, and it's the same 25. So the same, you got your design worked out, you proved it, now your cookie cutter in 25 of those a year, the cost curves are gonna go way down. Now what I don't know enough about and I need to jump into is the fuel costs and all of that.

The fuel costs are a big piece of these microreactors and the big reactors. And I know that there's people working on creating competition with that to drive those prices down too. So, but yeah, as far as the machines, they're going to get cheaper and cheaper. And there needs to be three competitors in all of this and to get the price to be where we want it to be.

I think that I can see a path where if we do this right and we keep doing it, you know, all nuclear energy will be very competitive with all of the other energies. You need them all. That's the beauty of our capitalist system. China might be able to move fast because they can just put it where they want, but the US economy, the capitalist system is going to find a way to make it affordable because the competition, the potential for profit, they're going to find the most efficient way to do it.

That's right. And we might do some dumb things along the way, but that's us sorting it out and figuring it out and getting there quicker, right? Where they've got a few people on the top that did the design and then they're like, no, no, that's just it. That's, that's what we're going to do.

You know, that that's not very smart. You know, that, that, doesn't, it doesn't self-correct. Whereas the capitalism and the freedom in the United States, it sort of self-corrects. If there's huge demand and a lot of money behind that demand.

bunch of people come in and supply that demand. And then as that sorts itself out, then you end up with three really great players in that business. And then they keep each other honest. And that's a great system.

It's worked for 250 years. I'm a huge fan of it. I'd take that any day over the speed that a communist country can do things. uh Yeah.

So you've mentioned the efficiency of some of the systems we have right now and you're investing in nuclear. What do you foresee as the future of our power grid here in the United States? Are we going to continue to be diversified or things going to move more nuclear, whether it's large plants or smaller reactors? What do you foresee as the future over the next 10, 15 years?

you're going to continue to be diversified for the next hundreds of years. And I have proof of that. There's only one energy. When you look at all the energy that we've ever used from the beginning of time till now, there's only one energy that we stopped using and that was whale oil.

And interestingly enough, that wasn't for an environmental reason. That was because it was too expensive. You know, as the whales, as we killed the ones that were close and they were too expensive to go away out. harvest them, they stopped doing that.

So it was a completely cost driven reason for stopping. Nowadays, you'd be like, yes, somebody saved the whales, which I'm glad they did. But that was not, that was not why they did it. They did it because it wasn't competitive.

Every other energy we're still using, even uh feces from animals. And if you go to India, they still pile them up in pyramids and sell them so that they burn them like wood. And then we still burn wood. You talk about the least.

mean, it's, it's crazy how bad of an energy source that is. Uh, and so my, well, the truth is you're going to use all energies that you have available and they all have a spot. every one of them has a spot that there's people act like, well, we need to just do this one or this one's going to win. No, that's not true.

These fits, and once you put one in, they last a long time, five years to a hundred years. You're not going to put a new one in. You're going to keep running that one, optimizing it, and get all the good you can out of it. Now, which one will they be adding onto?

Whatever the government decides to support, I guess. So what you want when you're in an industry is you want growth, right? So once the growth stops, then the margins start going away and it's kind of a race to the bottom. So which one will be growing?

Definitely nuclear is a growing one right now. And hydro can't grow because you don't have that many places to put it. Although hydro is arguably, you know, it's really elegant, beautiful way to create energy. And solar, there's good places for solar in Phoenix, Arizona.

Solar really helps because when the air conditioners are kicking on, the solar is kicking on, right? And so there's places that it all fits. But I think what we need to stop doing is fighting about it. And we just need to let the smart people that spend their lives thinking about this say, well, here's your three choices of energy that would be the best.

here's, you know, choose, you choose which one, right? We have that knowledge with AI now, we can very easily optimize that and stop making it about dumb things that aren't the cost of energy. know, environment, yes, we all want a clean environment. Nobody's going to want to contaminate the environment.

So that's just true. And that can be true with all of these energy sources, except probably wood, probably pretty hard to argue that wood won't. cause pollution, but yeah, it's all of the above forever. And that's been true our entire existence.

And I think it will continue being true. And I think the other thing that will continue being true is any of them that are big polluters. Like if we decided to go back to just wood and we were only burning wood to heat Gillette, people would put a stop to that really quick. As soon as it started, you know, polluting the air.

they would stop it and that's abundantly fair as well. And the other thing that I think is very, important for people to know is the middle class pays for all of this stuff. So don't do dumb things that are just wasting money for dumb reasons because the middle class can't afford it. And if you outstrip their ability to pay for things, it all falls apart anyway.

And they need a break. So we need to be thoughtful about the whole thing and put all the energies in that we can and keep up with the demand. Keep people's lights on. Keep people's lights on.

Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, it's not going to be the consumers that are the first cut off. They think they will be, but they're not.

They're the last ones that get cut off. What happens is first they call the steel mill, they call the mine, they call the industry, they're big power users and they're like, shut your stuff off. So the voters, the middle class that's not out working in one of these heavy industries uses a lot of power. won't be the first ones cut off.

So that's another reason that heavy industry knows that. And they're like, oof, if they get cut off for a few weeks, it completely ruined their profitability and ruined the contracts. I mean, they're at serious risk. So they have to kind of take control and have plan Bs and Cs for energy to keep themselves going.

Because when the grid's having to curtail, they'll be curtailing the businesses first. Yeah. Yeah. If you're in a large industry, controlled industry, that's only making a couple percent per year of profit margin, you get shut down for a week.

That's it. Yeah. when I owned that shop in South Africa, was right when the blackened power was coming back in and they took all of the trains off of the railroad, all the coal trains, and they put them on the roads to create jobs. Immediately beat the hell out of the roads, huge potholes, destroyed the roads and couldn't get the coal to the power plants anymore.

And this was over about a year period of time. So we started seeing rolling brown outs and black outs. That company became unprofitable immediately. Within a month, it was unprofitable.

So we've seen it happen and it's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you.

think the best solution is when a large industry, when corporate America starts solving that problem themselves, they're going to, they're going to find the most efficient ways to do it. And it's going to come through in product cost rather than taxes or, utility costs. It is. Yeah.

You pay for what you get. add it to the product costs and the person that's benefiting from that gets to pay the bill. You can't do that all the time. I'm not against the government priming the pump to get things going.

They have to sometimes, but it shouldn't be a constant thing where you're taking something that somebody should be paying for and charging it to everybody else. That's when it's gone awry. Yeah, that's why capitalism works is that the consumer pays the cost of the product. You're not paying for your neighbor's stuff.

So, awesome. Well, I want to shift a little bit. We've talked a lot about your businesses and now especially the energy industry. Let's dive a little bit more into your journey.

You you started at 14 years old, just running a machine and a machine shop and are now president and CEO of multiple companies, what has been the most difficult step in your career journey? The difficult step was getting good at working with people and running people and getting the right team that wanted to work with me and that I wanted to work with. So I think the people are the most difficult. It's very difficult to find work and grow work as well.

But if you have the right people and you know how to lead people and reward them and all of those things that go into human resources. The people make it easy, right? If you can, if you can gather up a team and I was absolutely terrible at it. I hadn't really had any training at it.

My, my dad was kind of a maniac. You know, he, he ran an old school uh oil 1970s oilfield style where he'd come in, calling the every name in the book, screaming the Allen Banes popping out in his head. And that was just how he spent his day. Right.

So I knew I didn't want to do that because that wasn't working by the time the nineties come around. anymore. You just lost people. But I was still, you know, was kind of a young punk jerk.

And I remember I got a 360. They did a 360, which is they have all the people around you evaluate you. And my dad delivered that to me and I was so pissed. So pissed because everybody hated me, right?

But it was a wake up call for me and I'm like, okay, I needed that. So I started working on being a better leader and I'm still working on being a better leader. You're never done. It's just always constant.

So I think that's the hardest part for me and the biggest learning and I'm still learning and now I'm into the mental fitness, mental resilience and unique abilities and flow. So it's a higher level. But finding great people, I am convinced that I can grow as much as I can find great talent to service the customers and find and retain, right? So for the first 50 years of L &H, we had 30 % turnover.

So 30 % of the people would leave every year. started working on that and trying to change that when I took over as president. Uh, and in 2000, so I took over as president around 2000, 2012, it dropped to 3%. And I remember calling Denise, my HR manager, and I'm like, did we do something or is this just a, what's going on here?

We've never seen anywhere close to 3 % never seen single digits ever. This is, don't know. We'll see. It's been at 3 % since then.

Now it's at 2%. So we only have 2 % of our people leave every year. And that's astounding. If you run the numbers on 30 % turnover versus 2 % turnover, it's all of our net.

We would have no net if we were still at 30 % turnover. So it's really, yeah, it's hard because people are slippery and it's important. If you do it right, you end up with awesome people that you end up like Navy SEALs or our mental fitness coach that we have was a, was a, uh, it was a green beret, all of these special forces, right? You end up knowing that person beside you and you got their back and you know what they're going to do.

You know what they're going to say before they say, you know what they're going to do before they do it. You know, each other has each other's back. You know, when they're having a tough time and you pick them up when, when they have a tough time, you do the same. And that's the culture we're going for and that's next level and it's awesome.

Yeah, that's incredible. Man, 2%, that's kind of unheard of in any industry. So especially a blue collar industry, that's pretty impressive. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, very proud of it. It's, it's probably my biggest, biggest accomplishment.

And, it took a lifetime to, to get there. And, and, and as you know, it would take a few minutes to screw it up. Yeah. You constantly have to work on that and, and, create it and make it happen.

And if you end up being an idiot for a few weeks, you could ruin all of that. Yeah, absolutely. It takes a lot of attention. oh In your uh time growing within the business, leading the business, growing the business, at what point were you most afraid and what were the consequences kind of driving that fear?

Yeah, it was probably when I took over as president, that was probably the biggest fear that I had because I was, I had no business doing that. We'd bought out dad for half of the company. And then two years later, we buy out my oldest brother for another half. So I bought a hundred percent of the company in two years.

I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that. Although my bank told me you can't do that. we had to change banks in order to get it done. But I had no idea how far I had my juggler stuck out.

We got it done and thank goodness it was in one of those growth spurts, right? So it just got lucky and we were in a growth spurts. We were able to work our way out of it. But when you take over from any previous leader and they were both great leaders.

the people that are there, you know, they were following that person, not you. So then there has to be this transition and some of them go away right away and some of them you have to weed out. And there's this whole transition of you either winning over the people that are there, which is very hard, or getting rid of them and getting your own team. So there was probably a 10 year transition there.

that you didn't really know who was working for you and who was trying to get rid of you. And so that was a big, bold change. Plus, like I said, I was ill-equipped from a capability standpoint for that job. It took me quite a few years to grow into it.

And so there was a lot of risk there. Yeah, that's it. And I've stuck, I've stuck my neck out quite a few times. I kind of do that every once in while, but that was definitely the biggest and scariest one.

And thank goodness it worked. Cause if it wouldn't have worked, I would have not only let down my family. You know, I had notes to my dad and my mom and my brothers, my brother for, uh, for years. So I would have.

I would really let a lot of people down and thank goodness it worked out. Yeah. Yeah. So for the young entrepreneur, the young leader out there that maybe stepping into a position they don't feel qualified for or aren't quite yet qualified for, what advice would you have for them to do what you've done and really step into that role and become successful?

Yeah, you follow your heart and your gut. your, your, your head, heart and gut. spent way too much time in my head, uh, up until about seven, eight years ago. And, you know, basically ignoring my heart and gut and let my head veto them.

You know, don't do that. You know, follow your head, heart and gut and know yourself. You know, I, I knew that I could, was a workaholic and I still am a workaholic. I'm a little recovered now.

But I knew I could work my way through it. I could work harder and more than anybody else. So I would win, right? But you have to know yourself.

Not everybody's built the same way. But you take those risks and you learn from them. And I hesitate giving people advice to be too aggressive or not aggressive enough because I was very aggressive. Like you said, at 32, I was a president of LNH Industrial, which was probably a $7 million, $8 million company back then.

But that's still a serious number for a 32-year-old that hadn't been trained to do that job. You know, the, have to do their thing, but I did it by working a lot and being a workaholic and, uh, and I did it my way and they need to do it their way. But now, now with AI, it is so much simpler with, with AI. They have access to all knowledge ever, ever, all of it.

So they just need to know how to ask good questions and then they could set up their AI. So if I had it to do over again and I had AI in 2000, I would have focused on learning AI. I would have set up my executive CEO, CFO, dash dashboards on that. And it would have hand fed me what I needed to look at and pay attention to.

But. Word of warning, it would have told me no way don't buy out my oldest brother. So this is where the heart and the gut comes along. Right.

So sometimes not having that information served me well, got lucky, luck is part of it. Right. So, yeah, it's, it's a hard one, but, uh, you know, I like being bold. like, uh, taking hard problems and solving them.

And I think it's. incredibly great now that everybody has access to AI, has access to all knowledge ever, and it puts it in context that they can understand. And so it's going to be easier for people to do it now, but it's not always great to have all the knowledge either. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and you do things because you don't know any better.

And so that one worries me a little bit that Now we all have all this knowledge and you're doing things perfectly, but that's going to make you not do things that if you would have otherwise done them, you would have, you know, he would have been more successful. It's, an interesting problem. I didn't, I didn't answer your question, but I don't think there's an answer. I think they, have to do their own thing.

I coach all the people at Wyoming, not all of them, but some people at Wyoming, innovative entrepreneurs. And I try to get them to figure out, they usually know what they want to do. My mental fitness coach, Travis, he coaches me and all my people and he coaches all kinds of top executives around the world. He's been doing it for ever since he got out of being a green beret.

He's been doing that and he says the hardest thing for people is to choose what they want. So I saying is you can have anything you want. You just can't have everything. And when he's working with people, they You know, they can give them a litany of things they don't want that are happening to them in their life.

So he gets the list and he's like, okay, I got all that. I got all the stuff you don't want, but now what do you want? And that is such a hard question for us human beings because we don't want to choose. So choosing and focusing is very important.

you, if you look at my skillset, I mean, it sounds pretty broad when you read read it off. It is broad, but I've been at it for 43 years, right? But it's really focused on fixing things and making things and people. so they're really my depth out of that gets shallow that I've been focused on this thing for 40 some years.

that That's why I'm where I'm at. And that's why I bought everybody out along the way because they're like, done, would you buy it from me? And I just kept buying and you end up with this thing. And this is why it's important to make sure it's your unique ability and passion because I love this thing that I've created and co-created with all of these amazing people over the past 40 years.

I love it and I do it because I love it and that's the most important thing is if you love what you do you're focused on it and doing it. So you mentioned you're running about six or seven million when you took over. Do you mind sharing what you've grown that to? How have you guys grown over the last 25 years?

It's 115 million right now. And we grow around 5 % a year and it's choppy. It's not 5%. It's choppy, right?

You'll have your ups and downs. But 115 million and it's 100 % closely, privately held. Matter of fact, it's 100 % held by family for the first time ever as of two years ago. We bought the last non-blood shareholder out.

So it's now it's me. I own about half of it. And then I got my son gauge, Liz and Sheridan and my nephews, Dustin and Jason, and they own the other half, which is beautiful. So why, why is that beautiful?

Because you're not having to buy out any more shareholders. I've spent my entire life buying out shareholders. I can't even imagine how many I've bought out, like 20, some of them. It's incredible.

So you got all of this equity going out to buy out. shareholders, right? And we're at the end of that because I don't want to retire. And thank goodness, my partners don't want me to retire yet.

So I get to stay and do the fun things. They do all the follow through stuff and run the company. It's managed by them, but I get to do the cool stuff that I decide to do. in the micro reactors or an AI or setting up this new NQA and the crazy new stuff that may or may not work, but somebody needs to go spend the time on it, And so they do all of that.

so the reason that's important is too many of these companies are for sale. And when you're for, if you're for sale, then You know, that's fine for the person that owns the shares and you get, you know, pump it up for a big sale and they get a bunch of money and everybody high fives. But the company is never the same after the sale because it's got a different leader. They got to pay that sale back.

It was probably sold for too much. And now. The beatings will continue until they can get their money back out of it. And that company that bought it, a lot of times they're in it for a very short time.

So they're just going to flog the heck out of it and try to get it worth five times more and then they're going to dump it. The customers don't get great service. The employees are just getting whiplash and put through all kinds of nonsense. I like to own it and have the family own it to protect the shares.

And then the companies ran for the good of the tribe and the tribe being employees, the vendors, the customers. They all count on us continuing to do what we do and continuing to grow and to be here when they pick up the phone. And I think even with just employees, there's probably 1500 people. By the time they figure the 500 nationally and internationally and then their family members, there's probably 1,500 people that count on L and H for their livelihood.

And yeah, so it's a big tribe and it's our tribe. That's awesome. Well, that's an incredible story and, uh, man, an incredible success to start where you did and take it to where you have. So that's great.

oh we'll keep rolling and keep pushing it. It gets easier the longer you go. Yeah. man.

Yeah. had a conversation recently that, uh, man, you know, five years ago, a problem that would have been just a debilitating stop the presses, take all my attention problem today. just call that Tuesday, you know, as, as the company grows and you grow and, uh, you gain ability and gain skills and that, and that's very evident with you as well. So.

Yeah, you've been through it before and you have better people and better machines and better systems. And you just sail through it where, like you said, it would stop you in your tracks five or 10 years ago. And now it's no problem. Just a Tuesday.

Was there anything that delayed your growth? And if so, how would you handle that differently today? Yeah, so the big thing that delayed my growth, I put in three different ERP systems, which is a computer system for manufacturer, enterprise resource planning systems. the first one was job boss and it was okay, right?

Collected our information. then, but then I learned that I wanted to schedule, I wanted to use it to schedule it because we were scheduling the shops on the back of a yellow notepad. I would schedule the machine shop and Roy would schedule the welding shop and Lee would schedule a mechanic shop. then we would try to work together, but we were actually competing and we would try to get things to flow through them.

And it was just an absolute nightmare. Things would get lost. It was terrible. so I bought another software that didn't work out.

It was a complete failure. It took me about... It was two years of trying to get it stood up. And at the end of that, I realized that it would not schedule.

It wasn't going to work. They'd sold me a bag of goods that would not work. I had a failure, right? That two year failure.

And this was right when I was buying or taking over as president. So then I take over as president and I've got this failure of the ERP system and we're back to using Job Boss. And I come in with this new system called visual that I'm like, okay, guys, I found the one. And I'm sure this one does what the concurrent finite schedule that we want to do.

And of course people didn't, you know, they weren't jumping up and down for that. So they were throwing rocks at me, but I started it and I, I drug them kicking and screaming for eight years, uh, because for a few reasons, I didn't know for sure that it would work. And concurrent finite scheduling is strange. It's three-year-old math, but the problem is you have 80 people that are doing things that affect the math.

So dates on purchase orders, dates on receivables, how many hours are supposed to be on the job? Are you reporting your percentage complete? Just everybody that is feeding information in can screw up the schedule if they don't do their information properly. So you're running around.

It's like pushing a waterbed down, right? You're running around and getting this person to do it right. And then you run over here to get this other person to do theirs right. And by the time that they do that and they quit doing theirs right.

So I was chasing that and there was a few guys that were just that I should have fired a lot earlier or, put the hammer down on, but I wasn't quite sure that, that it would work. I, I, I drug them kicking and screaming and it took me eight years. If I had to do it over again, it would probably take two or three years because I wouldn't put up with it. would just be, I would be a better leader and I would, I would be willing to, to get rid of people sooner that were standing in the way and not cooperating.

Yeah, that was, that was an expensive long one, but I got it. And there's only 4 % of manufacturers in the world that do concurrent finite scheduling because of that issue. And once it worked, so eight years after we started and it worked and they all saw it work because everybody, all of a sudden, you know, I got everybody doing what they were supposed to do. Then it was self-correcting and everybody would kill each other if they weren't putting the data in right and make it easily see who wasn't.

then they were all making sure that everybody was on the bus. It worked out. Okay, awesome. Well, this next question might tie into that, but is there a lesson that you wish you would have learned earlier?

learned earlier, it's a, no, don't know that one. That would be better to learn earlier and then anything to do with, with how to run people. and the, the, I guess the biggest one that would have been the biggest benefit. If I learned it earlier was mental fitness and mental resilience.

If I would have got onto that earlier, that's been a gold mine in the past. We've been working on it seven, eight years now. And it's an absolute gold mine to focus on your mental fitness and your mental resilience and then pack that bag of stones that we all carry around and get that part of it for you and your people. And when you put it out for your people, don't expect people to run.

uh, run for it because they've been jaded by all of the normal ways of doing it. But if you get a really good guy like Travis and you pay, you pay for it and you, you allow them and their kids or their, their, uh, their family to do it, you can change a lot of lives. It's, and you can save a lot of employees. can save a lot of marriages.

it's a complete game changer for you and your people. So that was going to be my follow-up question there is, especially in the trades, I think a lot of people are somewhat resistant to programs like that. mean, what does that look like and how did you gain the engagement of your staff? How did you gain the buy-in?

Yeah. So I was doing it to begin with and it was working so well that I offered it to my family and it was working so well there that I came to my partners and said, Hey, I'd like to offer this. And, uh, we'd put it out there and I started by doing videos and, uh, recording podcasts like this. They're on LNH, honestly, better mental fitness.

com free to everybody. And so I, Travis and I started sitting and talking like this about these issues and about what I was working on, what he sees in the world. So that was, that made it accessible. People could see that, you know, see that I was in it and I was talking about it as the leader.

and, but what ended up happening was when we first introduced it, the people that were really in crisis, you know, usually divorce or their teenage children are just, you know, into drugs and alcohol and going off the rails. So something traumatic like that. was four people that engaged him. And then he's so amazing that they told their friends and.

And then they told their friends. So now we're up to a hundred sessions a month, which is unbelievable. We're maxed out and we've added some other resources. Stacey Stuckey, my executive assistant does the unique ability, Colby Clifton in print stuff so that he can, hey, you need to go figure that out.

Go over to that person. And we've got another Sarah that works on the... works full time in Gillette and she's if you're working on your health and your fitness. She can also do some mental fitness and resilience stuff too.

She's into that, but she was hired for the health and fitness side of it. So we got three people that are focused on that and incredible engagement and you can't pencil it out on a spreadsheet. when I tell other entrepreneurs about this. And then I've even introduced people to Travis before, but he's too busy now.

I can't take anybody else, but when he could, nobody could replicate it because they, couldn't get past. You know, they wanted him to only talk about work stuff and not include the family. And they wanted to see it pencil out on the spreadsheet and it just doesn't work. kills the thing.

Right. Whereas we're just like, Hey, if you're helping our employees, I don't care if it's there, you know, they're. significant other or their kid, whatever. Just do what you need to do and we'll cover it.

And that works. And we're hands off. We give him a list of who our employees are so that he can make sure that they're just not random people coming in off the street. But we run it pretty loose and that works.

And then when you talk about return on investment, you have to use your imagination. What is it? What does it save you to not have people in a funk for years after a divorce or the one, you know, better yet, the ones that you saved from being divorced or the ones that would have quit because they were in such a, such a down area that they would have, they would have flamed out and quit and you were able to help them recover from that. That's worth, that's worth, I think it's worth millions a year to us and it's cost us about a quarter million each.

But you could argue that because you can't point to the column on the spreadsheet that quantifies it. It's like health, right? If you prevent the heart attack or the cancer, you don't have the measurement. Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff.

We've tried to get some programs like that going a lot smaller scale than that in my business. And we just had a hard time getting employees to take advantage of it or get the buy-in, but it sounds like you guys have kind of found the secret sauce there. It's all about the quality of the person that's doing the helping. Travis, I ran into Travis at this executive.

40 years is in uh that you go to and it's one week, expensive, intensive executive training. And I ran into him and it was incredible. And I'm like, man, I'd really like to bring this back to my family, but I can't afford to, know, schlep all them out here and pay for each of them to come to this, nor would it fit what that program is for. And I asked him if he would try to do it on Zoom.

And he's like, no, let's try it. if it works, but it's the quality of the person. That's it. Right.

That's, that's all I'm trying to say. If we lose Travis now, Stacy's amazing and Sarah's amazing. So we have a couple that are backfilling. but Travis is just next level and he's spent, I think he was a green Bray in 2000.

So he spent all that time since then training in this. He'll be hard to replace. I did create a Yoda chat bot though, that's available for anybody that wants it. That's on that honestly better mental fitness website.

And it runs off of chat GPT. It's trained off of, of all of the ancient, mental fitness people, philosophers that Travis believes in and follows their, their teachings. all, it's all ancient wisdom, right? So it's trained off of all this ancient wisdom and then all the stuff that Travis and I do and my know that self led by self book.

And it's really good. It works amazingly. Well, I get a lot of incredibly positive feedback. So that's available to anybody in the world.

You can get it on chat GPT, or you can get it on my honest to better mental fitness website and it's check it out. It's, uh, it's really good. Nothing better than face face with Travis, but This is available 24-7 free. Yeah.

That's cool that you, uh, put that out there for the whole world and, and allow access to everybody. That's great. So. Yeah, it's right thing to do.

Is there an opinion that you once held strongly that you've changed your mind about throughout your experience as a leader and throughout your career? And then I held strongly that I changed. Yeah, school was the first one, right? So I thought school was dumb as hell.

And then I realized it's not dumb just didn't fit for me being told what to do. So I changed my mind on a lot of the schooling stuff. Although I think now schooling is going to be completely disrupted by AI and needs to be in a lot of ways. There's still a lot of, you know, when I say that I mess around with Harvard and MIT, a lot of people are like, oh, that's snobby, which I was in that camp before I went there.

And once you go there, you realize that these are just, you know, top of the top elite people that are getting stuff done. you should hang out with them more, you know, they're not a snooty, most of them aren't as snooty as you think they are, right? So that's the school side of it. You know, I've spent a lot of time on thinking about compensation because compensation and incentives.

So when I was young and naive, actually I wrote my thesis, Kennedy Western on compensation. And I had a strong feeling that incentives would really drive performance. And I proved myself wrong about 2010. I finally woke up to the fact that The compensation needs to be there, but it is not what keeps people there.

Good people. As a matter of fact, I learned the opposite. The more you pay people, the more they'll just flake out and leave on your or resent you as those watching people with other companies that were getting paid, you know, $300,000 for a job that they should have been paid 154 and they completely resented their employer for it and left and went into competition with that employer. And that would happen time and time again.

So it was interesting. But as far as the compensation, people want fairness. Fairness is way more important than the amount. So as an employer, you really have to get fair on, how do we decide who gets paid what?

And how do we do profit sharing? So is the profit sharing fair? And do we make sure we're paying the people that should be paid and not paying people that shouldn't be paid? And then you have to make all of that simple enough to where people can generally agree on it, right?

And to make it simple enough, number one, you have to have a written plan that's shared. And then number two, you have to put people in charge of making these decisions that people trust. And they won't be right. There's no right.

It's just... We did our best and we had a way of doing it. And if people trust you and you do it fairly, then they'll stick around. And if they don't and they start thinking somebody's shady, then they'll leave you.

And so I think that compensation, was pretty convinced when I was young that... Incentives would would really drive performance. And now I'm convinced that you hire somebody and they've got people have this, you know, I work at a certain level. It doesn't really matter what you pay me.

I'm going to, I'm going to perform. I'm going to do these things and I'm going to do them over and over again. And, uh, if you don't pay me enough, I'll leave. Right.

That's true. And. If you got unpaid fair, fairness, you know, if your pay is not fair, then I'll probably leave too, because I don't like that. But as far as, uh, you know, incentives don't, don't drive real performers.

You you just lock them into a good pay. And the other thing that I learned is, and not to qualify, not everybody at LNH agrees with this stuff, but the other thing I think is true is, where was I going with that? It'll come back to me. I forgot that one.

The compensation is a big thing around figuring that out. That takes forever to figure out and you got to have your system. the, I did. So what came back to me.

So I like to pay people well, well enough, because what I, what I saw happening after being there for a long time was When people want to, they'll pick their head up once in a while and look around and see if you're screwing them. And they do not count any commissions nor any bonuses, anything that comes randomly and is not guaranteed, not built into their pay. They don't count that money when they're looking at different jobs. So when they're, when they pick their head up and they're looking around, they're just looking at base pay.

So you can't really retain great people with a low base pay and a high commission. Because as soon as things get a little bit tough and they know the commission's not there, they are going to jump to another company with higher pay. So I prefer a bigger higher pay and then a profit sharing. If the company makes X amount, anything over that we'll share.

and that, that works. Okay. But you do still like having a profit sharing component in there to incentivize performance. Yeah.

The profit sharing component is important because if you're really making it rain, people want a piece of that. Right. And so, yeah. So the company needs X amount.

So for us, it's 8%. We need 8 % to pay for our stuff and pay for new things going on. Right. So we need 8 % net for the company to be healthy and sustained.

So we split anything over that. We'll split with invoice. We got a graded system, eight to 10 and 10 up. that, as soon as we put that in, we became way more profitable.

That really, the community really responded to that. Now we don't just split that evenly. We have ways of splitting it that are fair. So if somebody's didn't add any value, there's Jason, one of my partners, largely.

does a lot of this for the production. If somebody's adding no value, they can get nothing. If somebody is adding twice the value, they can get double. And we try to keep it simple like that, right?

We don't try to, you can't turn it into a math problem is what I've learned too. I used to try to turn it all into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet math problem and that doesn't work because you can't put all of those other things in there that a human knows. So you have to put somebody in charge that's trusted to make those decisions. OK, interesting.

then they run it by other people that agree with them, right? Or disagree with them and adjust those decisions. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting system.

And we also have, we still have commissions, uh my other partner Dustin, and he likes to run commissions with his sales guys. Cause he's convinced that it does drive performance. Okay. Sophie.

as long as you, as long as you keep enough base pay to keep them happy in the slow times, then I think it's, fine. I'm not, I'm not, I argue that it drives performance on, on good people, but it does drive performance for some people. Some people really like that, that they like to have that carrot out there. Cool.

So if you could go back to when you were 14 years old starting out in the machine shop and do it all over again, would you? Yep, I would. love it. I love what I do.

Love where I'm at. Even all the nasty parts in between. mean, that's the stuff you look back at fondly now. So I'm one of the few lucky ones that still loves what I do.

And I can imagine doing this for another 40 years. And it's largely because of my great people and I get to do what I want to do. Right. I'm not, I'm not bogged down in anything I don't want to do.

My, my My personal values are love, freedom and flow. So I don't do anything that reduces the amount of love in my life or the amount of freedoms I have or the amount of flow I have. So that's what, that's what I'm shooting for personally. When I make all my decisions is love, freedom and flow.

plus I'm not good at the follow through stuff anyway. So I drive my guys crazy if I get into it. they're just like, let me, let me take that. I'll do that for you.

I'm like, great, please do. Awesome. That sounds like a sweet place to be. What has been your biggest win as a leader?

Biggest win. The biggest win is the team that I have now and how incredible they are on that, that 2 % turnover. mean, it's, it's very, very hard to gather up, you know, 250 tradesmen and, and other people supporting those tradesmen and have it be people you enjoy being around and that stick and stick around for, think our average 10 years, like 17 years or something crazy. And we all like each other and, you know, that's, that's, that's my biggest win.

It's the, it's the love of my work and the love of the people that are in, my work. and then, uh, we're, you know, we're just, we're continuing to ratchet that up a little bit all the time. Our, our immune system is so strong. If somebody fakes their way in.

Our interview process is pretty good. We usually weed out the people that aren't going to fit the culture. But if they, if they fake their way in and they get in, immune system kicks them out very quickly. So it seems self healing now that they don't stick around very long.

And I used to worry about that. Like what happened to that person, right? We just had them for three weeks. Now I'm like, Oh, must not have been a fit.

That's awesome. That's awesome. I think I'm going to quit asking that question because almost everybody says their team. All great leaders are proud of their people.

So that's awesome. Yeah, that might be true. So I know, yeah, you've pursued a lot of education, a lot of different areas. You've gone back to school twice.

I've heard you mentioned a number of different coaches that you've engaged. What has been your best resource to grow as a leader? Yeah, best resource to grow on the, on the technical piece is Peter Diamandis Abundance 360. And he has a podcast called Moonshots right now.

That's, that's amazing. If anybody wants to deep dive into that. And so Peter, I get my download of all of everything futuristic and tech from Peter. And then Dan Sullivan is on the thinking about my thinking.

So Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach is the best. He's got like 17,000 people that he coaches in the world. And, and, uh, he, he does the thinking about the thinking and the mindset and how to think about things. Uh, so I really enjoy that.

And I spend a lot more time on that because the yearly download from Peter's enough, that gives me enough of the tech stuff to work on all of my AI stuff. Digital things came from him. My moon shot of Innovate Energy came from him. But Dan, you know, keeps you focused and grounded and centered and then...

Travis Ramsey, know, him, him coaching me at 40 years as an and helping me with mental fitness and resilience has been incredible. Harvard was incredible. Harvard still these other ones will pay in the future. Harvard I did in 2007 to 2009.

So I've gotten arguably two million a year because of that, that time and money I spent with those people. These other ones, they could beat that, but they'll be less measurable. With the Harvard one, was very measurable. $2 million event, $2 million event, $2 million event.

Very, very focused back to people that I met at Harvard OPM and classmates. So those are the top four, top four. And what Dan Sullivan tells me, he's right, is there's always another level. So I've got lots of people that are in Strategic Coach and Antibiotics 360 that are...

leveling me up. Even with Travis, I met a guy that works on brain scans and reprogramming brain stuff. There's always another level, right? It's like climbing a mountain.

The higher you get, the more you can see and the more things you can do. And there's no end to it unless you retire or quit. And I don't ever plan on retiring or quitting because it sounds boring, right? This is so much fun that I can't imagine not doing.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. That's a pretty good ROI.

If you spend 20,000 a year for three years and gain 2 million a year after that. That's why I tell people, I've experienced living proof of this, just go to the best trainer that you can find and just pay the money. They're always expensive. Go to the best and figure out where everybody's going because not only is that trainer good, the professors at Harvard were amazing.

but there's 180 other entrepreneurs. I've gotten more out of the other entrepreneurs than I got out of the trainer. So there's this 2 million a year is because of a, I was sitting down with one of my classmates 13 years after we'd graduated. And this guy, him and I weren't that tight.

You know, we didn't really hang out, but he called me up and he's like, Hey, I'm down here. Do you want to go dinner? So I did. And I was telling him that I was headed towards debt free and he's like, why the hell are you doing that?

We, you we went to the same school and the same classes. Why that's dumb. Why are you doing that? And I said, well, I'm sick of mortgaging everything I have every time I sign a stupid little note on a machine or a, or something else.

And he was like, you don't have to do that. Let me introduce you to my banker and he'll set it up a different way. So he held my hand and introduced me to UMB and I was with Wells or I think I was with Wells at the time. And it cut my bank costs by 2 million a year by that one conversation with that one OPM guy and his intro to the bank.

And then his holding my hand through, know, do it this way. Don't do it that way. It's. It's incredible what those, and those are the little things that hap, little stupid things that happen, right?

That, that, uh, if you're with the right people, so, so, you know, go, go to the best trainer that you can go to. And I'm not saying just damn the cost. know cost matters, but man, I can't imagine my life if I wouldn't, talked my partners into letting me spend that 20 grand in that three weeks a year for three years, I wouldn't be where I am today. Yeah, that's something in my own life I regret not seeing the value in earlier with my own education and connections.

I always kind of discounted the connection aspect and I thought, well, I'm just gonna, I'm going to work hard. I'm going to prove myself and stand on my own work. And, you know, I think there's value in that, but man, the connections you can build along the way. There's a lot of opportunities I missed by not leveraging that.

So. There's a lot of good advice there. hole. The Bill Allette from MIT calls it a watering hole.

And what he means by that is you should hang out with people that you're aspiring to be like. So if you're aspiring to be a phenomenal business person of a privately held business and you go to a Harvard OPM, then you're around 180 people that have a very similar Set up like you and your head in the same direction and you feed off of each other and it's, a watering hole and, and you know, you are who you hang out with. So, if you don't like where you're at in life, just look around and see who you're hanging out with and, and change to hanging out with people that are where you want to be.

That the challenge you, right? And I think that one of the reasons we don't do that is we don't want to look stupid. You know, I don't like losing. don't like looking stupid.

But you know what? That's when I learn. So when I put myself in a situation where I'm with people that are way, way higher than I am, and I don't even understand what they're saying, but I want to, then I'm learning. then, and then I try to do that for others to pass it down, right?

Because if I'm to do that and they're, and these people are always incredibly gracious to hand me everything that they have. So that's one of the reasons I try to do the same thing, because I think we're all put here to help elevate each other and we're all on a journey and it's an individual journey, but we can sure help each other get there if we're clear on where we want to go. Amen. Good stuff.

So you mentioned selecting the best trainers. I know, I mean, we live in a world now where it seems like everybody is a personal coach, a life coach, some sort of a coach without any real backing or experience. And I've had some experience with some that were definitely not worth the money. How do you go about vetting, you know, finding the best trainer?

and uh vetting that to make sure it's somebody that really can provide value. Yeah, I get hit up by all kinds of them because these, these rebundance 360 and strategic coach I go to are full of those people that are just looking for people to coach. so, you know, I, I get them from each other. So I met, uh, Dan Sullivan through Peter D'Amendis.

So they were vouching for them, right? So it's usually a referral. I'm very suspicious when I get hit up by somebody that just cold calling. Matter of fact, if they're hitting me up on email or LinkedIn, I just ignore it.

just, I'm not, that's not how I find my people. And frankly, right now I don't need any more people. I got so many people that are helping me that I'm I'm committed with, I don't have another time. So there, there's actually a couple people that I would love to engage with that I know could teach me a lot about AI.

And I just, I don't, I can't do one more engagement. I'm already doing about a 360 strategic coach. I'm already doing the Travis stuff. That's enough, right?

That's enough. So I, I will tend to do too much of it. And then you're not doing your day job, which is what the point of doing all this stuff is to enhance your day job. Right.

But then you're spending all your time training and I'm guilty of that. so yeah. Uh, but you know, have people that, that you trust, tell you about these people. You can find them and you can find them easily now, but also use AI.

AI is a incredible teacher now of anything that you want to know. And. And it's on your terms at your demand. So I use AI a lot for, for teaching me and training me.

And I I'll use it to sort people out too, but you'll know it when, when, when this person has really has something to offer you and it just feels right in your head, heart and your gut are like, yes, I have to do this. That's when you do it. So if it's a hell yes, do it. If it's anything but a hell yes, don't do it.

Yeah, I had a personal rule there for a few years with, if you call me trying to solve a problem I didn't know I had, the answer is no. Like, if I know I have a problem, I will go find you to solve it for me. If you call me trying to solve one of my problems, that's not a problem that I have. So.

Yes. Yeah. And the world is so full of them now. And then they're making these AI agents to chase you around.

It's going to get exhausting, we'll just, we'll filter them all, right? We'll put them all on block. Yep. All right.

Well, this is my uh favorite question that I ask of every guest. Are you a person of a particular faith tradition? And if so, how has that shaped your leadership journey? So I was brought up Catholic and my parents were pretty strict Catholic.

I was baptized and we went to church probably till 17 or something when they gave up. I am very spiritual, but I'm not religious. The religions bug me because of the control issue. I already told you I have control issues.

I don't like being controlled. And church seems like it was set up by men to control men. And so I don't like that, I'm because of that, I'm very glad that my parents put me through the Catholic stuff. And I believe in God.

I believe in Jesus. I know that that all happened and I believe that there's higher powers. I know there is. I know now today more than I knew three years ago that there are higher powers.

I I believe there's uh angels following me around. there's no way I could have gone where I'm at in my life without having a guardian angel. Now that's a very Catholic thing, right? So, but, yeah, I'm a believer.

I have an incredible amount of faith and, and not actively in any religion, but I like them all. And what I do now is when I'm searching for the truth, is I go to my AI and I say, look at all of the religious scriptures from everything and tell me what you see common through all of them. That's where the truth lies. There you can find the real truths.

But then when a person grabs that and creates the religion and they put things in and they put them in for good reason to get people to behave in a certain way that's better for those people and to get money out of those people too. there's a lot of truth in all of the Bibles and all of the religions and they're very useful and I would encourage anybody to go through it. And I think the point is to become very spiritual and know there's something beyond yourself and also know that we're all connected.

We can all. read each other's minds and we don't like to know that because it's very uncomfortable. But we're connected people and you can, I don't know what the connection is, but I can tap into the spirit of all of it and get downloads that just came from somewhere that I just know, but I don't know how I know them. How about you?

I'm a committed practicing Christian. So we attend a Christian church and pretty devoted there. So, yeah. I love it.

And anytime that you're meditating or praying or any of that, it's very valuable time. Yeah. So is there somebody that you would like to see on the show, somebody that has a really unique story or an interesting career, interesting industry that you'd like to learn more about? Hmm, that's interesting.

Elon Musk is always interesting to talk to. Well, if you can make that connection, I would love to have him on. Right now, he's not responding to my emails, so... Did not?

Dang it. Dang it. Any of politicians running this race we have coming up is very important. And I want the politicians that are for pro-business and growth and diversification to win.

think this... this radical stuff is wearing on me. But I was talking to Beau Bightman, he's running for Congress. I think he would be a good one to be on your show.

He's really got it plugged in. Anybody that's gonna help businesses grow and diversify and help Wyoming. Okay. Awesome.

Well, that's an angle I've not looked at before, so I might dig into that, especially as we get a little bit closer. It's coming up faster than I would like, I think. So, yeah. other thing that the people need to know is the primaries are what sets it all.

If you don't vote at the primary, your vote's really not that important. What's that? uh the primary decides it, the general election, it's all done by then. Yeah.

guilty of not going to the primary, from now on, I have not been very happy with our politics last couple of years. So from now on, I'm going to make sure I make it to those primaries and I'm going to be preaching to everybody to make it to the primaries. think, uh, think both said it was in August 18th or something. So it's coming right up.

it's game on for, for the election right now. Yeah. It's time. eh my last question, we ask of most of our guests to either fuel or settle the debate.

If you have a job to do and have to use a cordless tool, which brand do you prefer? I buy the DeWalt. I like DeWalt. How about you?

I'm a DeWalt guy. think Milwaukee has been edging us out. Those are the two big contenders of all my guests is Milwaukee and DeWalt. And I think Milwaukee might be pulling ahead, but I'm a DeWalt guy.

I've had DeWalt for a long time. They've just served me well. Yeah, that's right. I like them.

Awesome. Well, Mike, thank you so much. This really has been a pleasure. You are just a fountain of knowledge on a number of different fronts from, you know, manufacturing to energy to business and leadership.

I know you're a busy guy. You're running a couple massive companies and have a lot going on. So I really appreciate your wisdom. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

You bet Erick, thanks for the time. It was a great conversation. I appreciate it. this has been great.

And thank you guys for joining us here on from the ground up show. Again, if you like the content, if you want to support the show, like follow subscribe, subscribe, share on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube, social media, we are at from the ground up show. check out our merch store shop.fromthegroundupshow.

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