The Carpenter

Flying home from Ontario last week, I started listening to “The Carpenter” by Jon Gordon. The book presents a simple and powerful framework built around three key pillars that the Carpenter in the book lives by:

1. Love

• Love what you do.

• Show love to the people you serve.

• Let love drive your actions, relationships, and leadership.

The idea is that when you infuse your work and relationships with love, it creates passion, energy, and deep connection. It turns tasks into meaningful contributions.

2. Serve

• Focus on serving others, not just on your own success.

• Help people grow and feel valued.

• Serve your team, customers, family—anyone you interact with.

The message here is that greatness comes from giving, not taking. When you serve well, success often follows as a byproduct.

3. Care

• Care about the work, the people, and the outcome.

• Pay attention to detail.

• Go the extra mile.

Caring shows up in excellence, in the effort you put in, and in the integrity of how you show up daily.

Together, Love, Serve, and Care form the foundation of the Carpenter’s approach to building a successful life, business, and relationships.

We try to put these three things to work with our customers and our customers love us for it. People can feel when they are being loved, served, and cared for. Our employees feel it too. So does my family.

It’s a quick read or listen and a wonderful reminder that success in life is not tied to some complicated formula that is difficult to get right. It really is simple. However, simple is not always easy.

Business is Tough

Our spring show season is over. Two shows we set up ourselves, and two shows were sponsored by two of our dealers. Spring shows and spring sales mark the beginning of our very busy season. While a show is in action, I find myself checking our dashboard several times a day, just to check if new sales have been made. Every sale feels like another win, which it is (in a small way). Every sale also means we need to produce and successfully deliver another building. That is our business.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on the emotional ride our small business has taken me on. There have been and continue to be tons of challenges to tackle. I knew this would be the case when we purchased the business almost two years ago, but this is now my lived experience. And it is visceral.

Week follows week where I experience the whole spectrum of emotion. Great sales feel great. A valued employee goes to work elsewhere - feels way less than great. Our mule breaks down 5 hours away, and pulling an all nighter to supply parts and make the delivery possible - doesn’t feel great. Being gone from my little family because of business training - doesn’t feel great. Eating a 12 oz. New York Striploin steak for supper today because I am away from home tasted very good.

There are days when business is more than it was supposed to be. Other days there are real perks that come with the pain. Like having a heartfelt conversation with one of our guys. In about a month from now I get to go to the Entreleadership Summit. If you would have told me I would get to go 10 years ago, I probably would not have believed you. It is about to become a reality!

Last week I properly discovered the Shark Tank on YouTube. While the Sharks act like sharks at times, the reality of business is laid bare. The marketplace is not an easy place to thrive.

One more thing. The bigger the business, the bigger the potential for greater success and more problems. As the business grows, everything is amplified. Both the good and the bad.

At times I think about divorcing my feelings from the experience. But that is no recipe for caring. Each experience must be felt, experienced, and then given not too much or too little space. How much space and time is allotted should be directly proportional to the magnitude of what is happening. The challenge? Keeping level headed and staying the course even when times feel tough and my heart is heavy.

To Experiment or Not?

I am still reading the book Range, which is a book that has challenged some of my ideas and affirmed others. In the book, David Epstein weighs whether or not experimentation in life is a positive thing. From children learning to play a sport (or several sports) or other children learning to play an instrument (or experiment with a range of instruments), to adults trying to find their way life’s calling by either picking one path, or sampling for an extended period of time before settling….

Society tends to look more favourable on the people that pick early. Learn to play the violin and master it by playing it for 10,000 hours by the time you’re 18 and you garner the respect of others. Or, pick a career path as a sales guy who then becomes a sales manager who then becomes CSO (chief sales officer) at a multi-million dollar enterprise and you are looked on as having it figured out.

This linear pathway seems to be the most efficient pathway. And certainly the neatest. Early pickers tend to eat their lunches first.

But David Epstein makes a very compelling case for experimenting early and lots. Sure, you’ll find yourself behind your peers early on, but you are building a set of skills that can overlap widely which can then be utilized across multiple domains throughout life.

Before reading this book, I have observed this experimental behaviour in my own life; (I am a sampler by nature). I’ve often wondered whether it is a negative or positive trait. I’ve lost money because of it. Quite a bit of money. I’ve often wondered whether the skill set picked up along this meandering path will make up for the, well, meandering path?

Plenty of my peers have worked at one or two jobs in the last 10 years while I have done many things. While some job moves couldn’t be helped much, others were certainly by my own choosing. Like going from one perfectly fine job to another, which was precisely the case in my last job move in 2021. The last 4 years have been the longest I have ever held down a job.

I still don’t have things figured out. But I have found that my broad (but not always deep) skill set has come in handy many times in running a business. These days, being a generalist is a skillset unto itself.

What do you think?

Broad or Deep

One of the things I regret when I look back over the last ten years is the fact that I have switched focus a few too many times. There is a silver lining to this, but lets first talk about the not so good results of ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).

One of the main downsides of having an attention deficit is that my ability to gain traction is diminished. After my stint at the University of Manitoba (read this post for a little more of my story), I worked for a bee farmer for a summer. Eventually I grew and ran my own small commercial honey bee operation. Then I sold my bees and equipment after several lackluster years that included high winter mortality rates and substandard honey production during the summer. A big influence on selling the bees was that a part time job that was supposed to last only for the winter had turned into a full time job. I decided that I was better off selling the bees and working full time at Diemo, a metal manufacturing shop. Diemo provided the opportunity for personal growth and good pay. My time at Diemo (a total of 3.5 years) has been my longest tenure so far of all the places I've worked.

Several good things have come from my time at Diemo. I had a wonderful time of asking Marty, the general manager, any question I wanted. Our discussions ranged from faith, business, and entrepreneurship to people and philosophy. I learned so much during those 3.5 years at Diemo. Just the other week I was looking for advice on a matter. I sent him an email midday, and he responded to my request for a call within several minutes. Relationships like this are invaluable. I look back on my time at Diemo with fondness.

I feel though that Diemo has been an anomaly in my experience. I wish I had five "Diemo" stories to tell. I don't. I hope that my Pine View Buildings story will be another story of few regrets and many fond moments.

The upside to not focusing on one thing for too long at a time is that you can potentially have many experiences. Working at 5 different jobs over 10 years will tend to give you broader experience than working at one job over 10 years. Working at any given thing for a very long time will give you deep experience.

Question is, which one do you want? Broad experience or deep experience? I will break this post off here. I want to get into the deep vs broad discussion in the future.

Based on Trust

Last week I was on a video call with our CPA. Part of our conversation covered the topic of business banking and how business bankers rely heavily on trust. A CPA with a great reputation introducing us to a banker potentially changes how the banker views us. We are not just someone looking for the services he offers, but rather this is the start of a relationship that has an element of rapport built in right from the start. Business bankers that like you will advocate for you. If they don't like you, tough.

An employee that feels like he is not being treated fairly will typically not stick around. My job as a boss is to be above board in all my interactions with my employees. I do not need to do as they think, but I do need to respectfully listen to and consider their arguments. I believe that an open exchange of ideas (without the fear of penalization) forms part of the basis of trust. Fair compensation reinforces our relationship. Try to hand your employees the short end of the stick and you have a recipe for disaster.

God entrusts us with so many things:

• relationships

• resources such as time and money

• natural talents

• spiritual gifts (for the Christian)

This is truly impressive. He tells us what He expects us to do, and gives us the parameters within which to accomplish the task. This is true delegation and based on immense trust. God's level of delegation is something I aspire to.

Peddle, then Balance

It is difficult to balance a bike that is not moving. It is also difficult to optimize a product or service without market response or feedback. Building a great product or service before it sees the light of day is a great idea. To build a product or service just to hide it on a shelf because of fear of failure or fear of it not being perfect... this is a sad outcome.

Some people carry product or service ideas in their heads and never actually test their ideas in real life. Turn that diamond in the rough over in your brain and it may get slightly more polished. But if it never gets the chance to interact with other people and hopefully improve their lives, how will you know what features to tweak or improve?

As obvious as it may seem, here are the steps:

• Ideate

• Build a prototype

• Improve on the prototype (several times if necessary)

• Give yourself a pep talk (that feeling in your stomach that your product or service isn't fully optimized is correct).

• Ignore the above feeling for now.

• Launch your thing.

• Listen carefully when customers make suggestions.

• Improve

• Get more feedback.

• Improve even more.

• Repeat the cycle.

Once your thing is launched, and your first customers' lives are actually improved, that knot in your stomach will likely leave. Let's shorten the above list:

1. Get on the bike.

2. Start peddling with one leg.

3. Then peddle for all you're worth, with both legs.

4. Balance the bike. Unlike balancing a real bike, which feels like second nature once you've done it once, balancing a business requires many skills. These can be acquired through learning, practicing, and/or hiring.

My team and I have been working on a new brand and e-commerce store. We are expecting to launch miniShed.ca around March 15, 2024. There is a little bug in my stomach that questions whether or not it will be a success. We will never know if we don't give it a go. So a go we'll give it. Peddle, then balance.

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Let me tell you a tale from my life. When I was approximately 12 years old, I single handedly made the yeast dough, braided the Challah bread, baked it, and then packaged it into large brown paper bags. Then I walked down our southern Manitoban paved village street and knocked on doors. I remember selling a large, fresh loaf for $9.00 – and this is 16 years ago. There, I've dated myself. I even sold half loaves to folks that didn't need a whole loaf. Our village was small. The village several miles west of us had way more people. So I enlisted one of my older siblings to give me a car ride over where I employed the same sales pitch: "Fresh bread that my mother taught me to make."

Would you buy bread from a 12 year old boy?

The following summer, we signed up for the farmer's market in the small city of Winkler, MB. I baked and sold many loaves of bread that summer.

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I wonder if the making of an entrepreneur begins early in life. For the sake of this article, an entrepreneur is simply a person who organizes and operates a business.

My parents could have stopped me from trying. They didn't. Would they have purchased bread from a 12 year old neighbour kid peddling it on the street? Probably not. But I never heard them knock my entrepreneurial idea. This, I think, is impressive.

I learned that I can act on an idea, "market" it to people who need what I create, and trade my creation for money. Ideas are worth a dime a dozen. I still produce a ton of them. But actually acting on an entrepreneurial idea. As a twelve year old boy. How does that experience not impact a person for life?

How I will respond to the entrepreneurial whims of my growing boy – that test is in the making.