You Can’t Scale What’s Stuck in Your Head

Kyle Hunt: Thanks for tuning into the Remodelers on the Rise show. Whether you're listening or watching, I appreciate you being here. If this was helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. We're putting out new episodes every single week focused on helping you build a better remodeling business with real stories, practical ideas, and things you can actually take and use. If you're on YouTube, hit that like button and turn on notifications so you know when new episodes drop. Hey remodelers, before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our friends at builder funnel. I've personally known Spencer and his team for over a decade and they are the marketing agency for remodelers who are serious about growth. They've developed something called the remodeler and builder growth framework, which covers all five key pillars. need to scale attract, convert, nurture, close and measure. Welcome. It's the Remodelers on the Rise show, folks. ⁓ It's kind of ⁓ springy feeling here in Michigan after a long ⁓ winter. ⁓ What's ⁓ the and world like where you are, AJ? In other words, it's not just marketing. It's a complete system to help you grow your revenue and your team. And the results speak for themselves. Builder funnel has helped clients generate millions in tracked revenue, including 4 million for a San Antonio remodeler scaling to Delaware remodeler to nearly 10 million and generating over 2 million for a Kansas city remodeler. If you're tired of inconsistent referrals and want a proven system to drive predictable.

Aj Ballantine: Today it's going be 82 degrees, so I'm loving it.

Kyle Hunt: If you're listening on a podcast app, a five-star review goes a long way and helps more remodelers find the show. We've got great links below or in the show notes where you can connect with us, check out our remodelers community and learn more about our coaching and resources. Appreciate you very much. See you on the next episode. and you are currently located where?

Aj Ballantine: Just north of DC. So we're kind of in between Baltimore, DC and ⁓ Frederick. ⁓ it's a great metropolitan area to be in for operating or modeling business and also to catch the seasons as they change, you know, get the nice cold winter weather, but also the nice hot summer and everything in between.

Kyle Hunt: It is true. high quality leads and the, and to actually turn them into booked projects, head over to builder funnel.com forward slash R O T R to learn more. That's builder funnel.com forward slash R O T. No doubt. I'm chatting with AJ Valentine, Cornerstone Remodeling, a wonderful remodeling company that we're going to be talking ⁓ about his kind of stages of growth today. And then he's also the owner of Render, R-E-N-D-R. How are things going on the render side, sir?

Aj Ballantine: Triple digit growth, ⁓ getting into some really big spaces and kind of home improvement retail and all that. it's been, it's pretty wild. ⁓ Those things are exciting, but also, you know, kind of dealing with kind of rolling out software to companies that are exactly like mine is really, really exciting. a chance to meet a lot of really great people.

Kyle Hunt: Just a quick break here to spotlight our friends at Builder Funnel, the agency that's proven over and over they know how to generate serious revenue for remodelers. And when I say revenue, I mean real numbers you can measure. 6.3 million for a remodeler in Atlanta, 1.2 million for a remodeler in Salt Lake City, even 746,000 for a deck builder in Jacksonville. And that's just a handful. Awesome. Awesome. Last time we saw each other was down at Job Tread Connect. We were just kind of talking about ⁓ in a phrase you used, even though it was a private conversation, we'll share it with the people because it was helpful and it was memorable. Bailey was saying, I remember that too. ⁓ You're being aggressive, aggressive intentionality. You said, I think maybe I said relentless intentionality, but I'm like, no, no, no, it was aggressive intentionality. And it really stuck with me. We were talking just about life. We were talking about life outside of work. And you use that phrase and I'm like, The truth is most marketing agencies talk about impressions and clicks. Builder Funnel talks about projects sold and revenue added. They've built a system that takes the guesswork out of marketing so you know your investment is working. If you're serious about growth and want your marketing to finally perform at the level your craftsmanship does, Builder Funnel is the partner you want. So if you're ready for a marketing system that actually helps grow your business, That's not like, yeah, I'm kind of making sure that as I'm growing my business and working in my business that, you know, I'm also making time for the kids and my wife and my faith and this and that. No, no, no, no. In addition to working hard and diligently on the business side, ⁓ I'm even more aggressively intentional on the things that really matter. So that stuck with me. And it's just a good reminder to bring that up. And anybody listening to this, you... Head over to builderfunnel.com slash ROTR to learn more builderfunnel.com slash ROTR. Building a successful business is amazing. It is hard. It is it is difficult. It is rewarding It's all of that but success on the business side at the expense of failure at home is fool's gold is not good So that aggressive intentionality ⁓ Just go ahead and comment on that and then we'll get into the topic de jour today Go and comment. What's what would you add on to that?

Aj Ballantine: you know that I view everything through like a faith-based lens, very faith-forward in how I run my companies, how I run my life. And so I'm looking at everything that God has given me in my life as something that I'm a steward over. So stewardship is just like kind of, I'm here to invest and grow these things that I'm in control of. ⁓ And looking at my businesses that way, why did God give me these businesses? But also my marriage, ⁓ my chance to be a father to my children. Those are also things that I need to be a really good steward over and invest in and grow those relationships. So when you look at life through that lens, you start to see all the components of your life. They're all pieces of who you are and investing intentionally in each one the way that God wants you to, I think is really important. So that's what I would add to that.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. Beautiful. Steward, steward. That's a good takeaway. I need to be a steward. ⁓ and, and that means a lot. That's got some weight to it. All right. AJ Valentine with cornerstone remodeling here as we sit in, in the, in the first quarter, second quarter of 2026. Tell me what your involvement looks like in the day in and day out. And also just what the company looks like overall team size revenue and that. And then I want to kind of go backwards into. a few stages before that. our goal today is, all right, here's where AJ is at right now, which is, which is at a level of the business and team size and revenue that a lot of you listening to this might aspire to get to. And what we want to do is try to unveil the curtain a little bit of, well, if we go back a few steps to that, what did it look like? And then he moved forward another step. What did that look like? And what were some of the challenges? What were some of the key things? We want to kind of paint that picture of How do we go from where we are to maybe ⁓ some good growth in the future? And hopefully there'll be some good takeaways from hearing that story. So the way things currently sit, describe that to us.

Aj Ballantine: Sure. ⁓ We were on pace to do about $11 million this year. ⁓ last year we did 9.6 or 9.8. The year before was just about eight. So there's just this pattern of growth to get to where we are. ⁓ Everything I talk about when it comes to growth, everything is very intentional. Like I was saying earlier to you that part of our vision statement is the pursuit of relentless growth. There's a big why behind that. But ⁓ We're doing a roughly, like I said, around 11 million. We've got a team of about 20, 21 folks, probably going to be 23 or 24 by the end of the year. We're situated just north of DC in a great metropolitan area. We are a design build company. We handle all of our design and production in-house, not entirely production in-house, but end-to-end we handle everything. And our average job size, you know, across our kitchens and additions, we're probably right around that two. 40 ballparks. That's about the level of work that we complete here.

Kyle Hunt: Well, and if I was talking to AJ Valentine in 2019, six, seven years ago, and he was listening and that AJ, I don't know if he still had a beard, maybe had a little less gray in the beard. think probably a few, I don't know, blonde, few less tattoos maybe that AJ had a few less tattoos on his arms like 2019. Would AJ in 2019 go, what are you talking about? That is

Aj Ballantine: There's no gray. It's actually blonde, believe it or not. It's not gray. Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: crazy what just came out of your mouth that many team members that type of average project size would that AJ have been pretty surprised or or did he anticipate this growth?

Aj Ballantine: You know, this actually encourages on a wonderful topic from a book called The Gap and the Gain. I think I mentioned that perhaps even on the last podcast we did. Looking back, yes, I think previous AJ would be looking at 2026 AJ as like, okay, I wanna do that and I wanna execute and I wanna get to that level. Is it a surprise? I don't want to sound cocky when I say it, it's not a surprise. Again, everything's been very intentional about our desire to get here. It was not accidental growth. made a you know, very diligent pursuit to get to where we are. But I have learned a lot of things the hard way through the growth. Even with the best of counsel, sometimes things come up and it's unanticipated. You got to deal with it. And we're just more resilient bunch over here.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, business is hard. If you're listening to this and you're like, oh man, it just seems like two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back. Business is not for the faint of heart. Building a business is hard work, but it's so rewarding in so many different ways. So keep, keep building, keep building. Now, now going back to that, whether it was 2019 or 20 or 21 or wherever that was, when you were more in that kind of two, 3 million range of things, what were kind of the priorities there? Maybe it was more around kind of trying to really get clear with some positions. Let's talk about kind of what allowed you to kind of get into that first, ⁓ that age of area of things of kind of two to three million. And then I wanna fast forward and go, all right, once you had that established, how did we get to that five or six million? What were some of the keys there? I wanna paint that picture. So let's walk back to kind of that two, three million range. What were you learning? What were you implementing?

Aj Ballantine: Oh gosh, yeah, was 2019. I don't know how you picked that perfectly. That was the year right before the growth. You've got your way. You kind of know.

Kyle Hunt: Well, you know, this is podcast number 300 and something. You know, I don't want to sound cocky like you were saying earlier, but you know, it's not my first rodeo. It was a lucky guess.

Aj Ballantine: I would say, yeah, in 2019, I think some of the things that we were doing is starting to understand the systems that we needed to put into place to kind of really support the business. And if you look at your core systems, it's finance, it's sales, and it's production. Those three things you really need to have in a good operational standing. And for us, production was great at the time, and finance had a really good handle on it. Certainly wasn't to the level sophistication we have now, but it was good, but it was the sales component. ⁓ Estimating was still being done in Excel. ⁓ It was all more or less in my head. I had templates for things, but ultimately not scalable to hire salespeople. And ⁓ I knew that if we wanted to make those decisions to grow and ultimately hire people to replace me in specific parts of my business, then a lot of what I was doing and what was in my head, ⁓ things that were like...

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: gut instincts, those needed to be part of the business process. So in 2019, we invested in at the time, Co-Construct, so that we can kind of get all of my cost stuff in my head into at least software. And we started to implement, obviously, as you know, Co-Construct and all the other tools, JobTread is what we're on now. Those tools are great because it doesn't just handle the one piece that I needed, which was estimating, but it also kind of lends a great assist with integrating with finance and production at the same time. So we knew that that was something that we really needed to do. We got that up and running. And one thing I'll add here is that I've never been afraid to hire. I talk about this with business owners all the time. In that two to three million dollar mark, you're really looking at that overhead saying, this is sustainable. Like, I'm not afraid of this number. And the minute you start thinking about, if I want to hire someone to do this job for me,

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: My overhead, my overhead, my overhead, my overhead. I have never been scared of my overhead. I will sell the work to pay for my overhead. The desire for me was growth, not just to free me up, but also, you we want to build the company and sustain more employees here. I'm getting off on a tangent there, but again, not afraid to hire. I think the, ⁓ two to $3 million mark is where business owners do need to make the decision that yes, I want to grow. And that means I have to hire. So I have to, I really have to be intentional about where I'm going with this.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. I heard I heard several things there and you said it repeated it there of ⁓ You know, I made the decision I needed to grow and I recognize this isn't scalable. What a huge huge transition if you actually you can stay at two or three million and Kind of hang out there and continue to refine things and you can do that by getting like you said your core system for finance You've got to keep refining that production sure And you can stay at two or 3 million and kind of still as the owner be mostly responsible for the sales and estimating. If you make the decision, not accidentally fall into not, ⁓ you know, just kind of, just woke up one day and I thought, no, no, like really strategically made the decision. want to grow. also here's why you, kind of hinted at that. Yes. Not only to free me up, but we wanted to grow opportunities. We wanted to scale the business for you can answer the question, fill in the blank. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You as a business owner can, you can make that decision. And I think some of us are just not making the decision. We're not, we're not deciding this is where I want to go. It is so much easier to get where you want to go when you're clear with where you want to go. I remember even two years ago, coming back from my mastermind group, actually before I left, said, honey, I was talking to my wife, Sarah, shout out. Hi honey. ⁓ wait, no. I said, honey, I was about to say, ⁓ if she's listening to this, I don't know if she's ever listened to my.

Aj Ballantine: ⁓ not me?

Kyle Hunt: I think sometimes my little clips pop up and like she's sitting next to me and I hear my voice come on and Then I hear like 10 seconds later my voice go bye. Bye and I'm like that hurts that hurts, honey I said, did you click the like button? She's like, ⁓ I forgot. Let me go back. Thank you. That helps the algorithm But I said honey, I'm going out there. I'm gonna come back with my five-year vision. I've been farting around with it I've been I've been debating do I want to do this do I want? And man, when I came back and said, this is where I'm going and here's why, again, I'm going to emphasize that. Here's why the steps involved became so much clearer. So I just really appreciated that you said, make the decision, make the decision. And then it becomes more clear. Okay, I've got to get this out of my head. I'm not going to continue running the business the way I'm going to. I've got to get these core systems in place. I got to be intentional with that. And I also liked the way you said, I'm not afraid of it. I'm not afraid of it. I'm going to hire. I'm going to invest in my overhead. lot of good stuff in there.

Aj Ballantine: Yeah, the one thing that think that holds some folks back from ⁓ their opportunity to grow, sometimes it's right in front of them. I'm getting busier, I'm getting busier. It seems like now is the right time, but ⁓ gosh, if I hire somebody, what if all this work goes away? My answer to that is it won't, it won't. It sure can. Gosh, I'm not trying to make light of the amount of effort that goes into keeping our pipeline full and so forth, but we do it. We do it. ⁓ One, because we have to, we feel obligated now to do it. But two, again, it was intentional. We said we were going to hire, we said we were going to grow. There was something that my old business partner used to say to me, was like, you'll always make more money. You're always going to make more money, you're always going to grow your career, you're always going to grow the business. The opportunity is there. Make the decision. If you want to grow, make the hire and then go out and sell.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: It's not that simple, but it's that simple.

Kyle Hunt: There you go. Yes, it is that similar. And especially when you, when you are clear with that core system of your finance side, that also is what allows you to take that risk a little bit more. Some people are making silly risks in their hiring or in investing because they're very murky. Their core finance system is very murky and unclear. Now you can take what AJ just said, Hey, let's go out there, hire that person. It's much easier. And I'm guessing that 2019 AJ, ⁓ You you had some financial stability. It was still risky. It's not like you had $3 million in the bank, but I'm encouraging everybody listening like the stronger and clearer you can get on the finance system, the easier it is to make some of these investments. One other thing on that two to three million. Go ahead, please.

Aj Ballantine: Yes. Alright. That would be, I was gonna say that would be the one asterisk I would put next to my comment is that I already understood my finances. I knew what was above my clog line, what was below it. I knew that any investment that I made into overhead, I used like a 5X roll. That meant that 5X more in revenue and always look at hires as fully loaded hires. Hey, just $100,000 a year. That 100 turns into 150 real quick.

Kyle Hunt: Yes.

Aj Ballantine: So I did have a really good handle on the finance piece before I decided to grow. And that would be my one suggestion that if you do want to grow past that 2 million and you don't know your numbers, Kyle's the guy. Kyle's the guy that can help you figure it out.

Kyle Hunt: Here I am, here I am. Yes, now we move into the next, let's say the next step or let's fast forward a little bit into that five or six million reigns that probably I was on a roll earlier. Bet you that was between 2021 and 2022, probably 2022 is when you were really saturated in there. How did I do?

Aj Ballantine: Almost. It's probably what it shouldn't have been. It was 2020. No, no, no, it's 2021. 2020, we had that weird time in our world's history, if you recall. We still grew that year, but we went from, in 2019, completing about 2 million in work to 2020 completing three, and then 2021 completing six. And we have not...

Kyle Hunt: Almost. Yeah, yes, yes.

Aj Ballantine: had a down year. It's been six, six and a half, seven, seven and a half, you know, so long.

Kyle Hunt: Cool. So as you reflect on that kind of five or six million area stage of revenue, what were some of the keys? What did you have to be doing differently and thinking about differently than that previous stage we just talked about?

Aj Ballantine: Well, five to six million dollars definitely pressure tests the systems that you build at two and three. I will say that. Some things handled well, some things needed just tweaking. Other things needed to be completely thrown away and redone. Our production ⁓ model is something that we completely upended and threw away and restarted. ⁓ The systems needed to be more refined throughout, you know,

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: co-construct the way that we were estimating needed to be fine tuned. I gosh, there are a lot of like one-offs that my team would not make excuses for, but ultimately that would be the excuse. Like, well, that was just a one-off. And when you have one offset $2 million when you're doing maybe 20 or 30 projects a year. okay, maybe three or four one-offs a year. But when you're doing two, three, four times the volume, those one-offs are like every week we're dealing with something that's not working the way that it should. We saw a lot of those, like I said, pressure testing the systems, we saw a lot of those things. My answer to all of those is I love the RCA, cause analysis, ask five whys, why did this happen? By the time you ask the fifth why,

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: You're usually getting to the root of the problem and that's the thing that you need to solve for. It's not the symptom. It's the actual root cause of the issue. And a lot of those things that we discovered in that five, $6 million range, it was all about accountability and process. That's all it was. And we saw around that time, a natural evolution started to occur in our business where we started to become a little bit more. corporate, if I dare say. It's kind of an icky feeling when you have this homegrown business and it starts to turn into something where you're doing formal reviews and you have processes and you're holding people accountable to new ways of doing things. You have the dreaded SOPs. Those things became a heck of a lot more important even than I anticipated. And as a result, what we discovered at the five to $6 million range was, like I said, we've never been afraid to hire, but I'll tell you what, probably one of the biggest defining moments of my journey of hiring has been hiring middle management. I never thought that my company, my remodeling business would ever need a... It was weird how we discovered this. was like, we have all these people now and we've hired more people. We've replicated a lot more positions down here, but it's still the same.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: management layer up here, managing now three times the amount of people still doing a lot of work. We need managers here. And when I did that, was like, got people here operating, we got people here making decisions, we need something in the middle. It was like I got hit in the face with a brick. like, ⁓ I need middle management, don't I? ⁓

Kyle Hunt: middle management. Every time we hear the word, a phrase middle management, it's got this ⁓ feel to it. Yeah. Wow. Who so I want I want to ask you who that was but I want to go back to two things. You you just mentioned the five whys. ⁓ give the give the one minute on that. Get one minute teaching on that. Where that comes from.

Aj Ballantine: Makes you gag. Yeah. Who knew middle management in our modeling business. ⁓ great. Root calls analysis. When you have a problem that came up, ⁓ anecdotally, I'll just share. ⁓ We had a client that I saw, we were, I don't know, 90 days past the finish line on the baseline. I'm like, why is this job still open? Well, it's because we're still waiting for this ⁓ thing to come in. Why? Well, because it wasn't ordered until the last step of the job. Why? Well, because we missed it. And we didn't realize that this wasn't done. Why well because we didn't do the 90 % walkthrough. ⁓ So this is still on my Gantt chart I still have this on the baseline 90 days later because you didn't do a 90 % walkthrough. It was a great learning ⁓ thing for my team to understand that we did actually have a Mechanism in place to prevent something like this happening But they failed to do it and it was a good time for everybody to recognize like look We are thinking about this correctly, but I wasn't just okay with having someone say, we're still waiting for parts and pieces. That was okay when we were at $2 million. But if I have 20 jobs that are still waiting for parts and pieces because half of the 90 % walkthroughs are not being completed, that's an issue.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. The first time you use something like a root cause analysis to five wise number one when you practice it it's gonna come off weird Your team's gonna be like dude. You're being super annoying right now. What is this? They might be thinking that or saying that but once you get the similar vernacular of going hey We have a problem in our business and let's RCA this And let's go through the five wise and you start seeing how people start engaging in that Wow, can we start to solve problems because of that that might be a new idea that some of you have. It's an idea that ⁓ I have that I haven't used in a while, so I'm gonna be using that. But that's an interesting example. And again, a lot of business owners, a lot of remodellers go, okay, I wanna grow, I wanna grow. Do you? Because you are going to absolutely need to grow in your leadership, in your ability to solve problems, in your ability to embrace, like what you just said, the corporate ease.

Aj Ballantine: percent.

Kyle Hunt: What are you talking about? I love my business. We just have so much fun and yeah, we've got SOPs, but yeah, we can just kind of, can wheel and deal. You know, they call me the gunslinger. I just kind of solve that and solve that. And if you actually want to run a five to $6 million remodeling company and go up from there, you have to embrace the tried and true things of like you said, SOPs of formal reviews. There's no more of this. ⁓ yeah. I haven't sat down with that. You need to, you need to Really think through how do I actually have accountability? ⁓ crap, I need an accountability charge. Maybe I should embrace this EOS thing. That corporate thing, the sooner you embrace it, doesn't mean that you're gonna be a doofus corporate company, but the sooner you recognize, no, we need standards and we need systems and we need to follow them. We can't afford to not follow them like we used to do if this is what we want. We need to learn things like RCA. We need to learn things. like how to follow up when problems are happening. We need to lean into healthy confrontation. All of that. I just wanted to really emphasize that because without that stuff, you just scaled a mess of a business.

Aj Ballantine: Absolutely. One thing I would add to that is I use RCA just, ⁓ no, that's great. I love it. Now I say amp it up, amp it up.

Kyle Hunt: Wait, was I too passionate? Am I too passionate and obnoxious? Do I need to tone that down a little bit? Cause you're a peaceful tone to the... No, you're bringing a peaceful tone. I think people are enjoying listening to you and they're probably like, dude, settle down.

Aj Ballantine: I would say ⁓ to add on to that is that I use RCA ⁓ almost subconsciously just with how I handle problems. It helps you become a better decision maker because I will say that when you're getting things thrown at you left and right ⁓ as we all are on a day-to-day basis, there are some things that you can just respond to quickly, but some things require a little bit more strategy behind it. Those are the things that I think hold a lot of business owners up. I want to make sure I'm making the right decision. When you have this RCA mindset, when you can really start getting down to the core root, it helps you hire better. ⁓ When you're looking at your business having a bottleneck issue, what is the bottleneck really? Because when you're looking at, okay, well, I just need to hire another person to do this. Is that really what you need or is it something else? causing this person to be a bottleneck. Is there something else that will increase throughput over here that's not going to cost you any more money? When you can quickly arrive at that conclusion, you make decisions faster and you're because you're more confident about making the right decisions for the business. So definitely something to apply in general thinking as a, as you said, as you evolve your leadership skills and improve them. That's a big one.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, well, we're over a couple of the middle management's hires that that became apparent that you needed.

Aj Ballantine: This is when we kind of threw out our ⁓ production ⁓ model that we had. We had a lot of in-house ⁓ site supervisors and one project manager. We kind of restructured. A lot of companies actually start out with the system that we're in now where we have more project managers and less in-house carpenters. sell a lot more out. So the project managers were one piece. But then we saw that we needed ⁓ you know, some, some more help in the design thing. So as we hired more designers and I offloaded some sales responsibility, hired a draftsman. ⁓ All of those people were still coming to me, asking me questions about how to handle something that honestly I needed to be brought up to speed on, you know, a lot of these things like, ⁓ well, Hey, how do I handle this customer issue? Well, give me the context. Now I've got to, I have to sit down, stop what I'm doing for 20 minutes to learn about what's happening over here.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: and then be able to provide you an answer. So we ended up promoting one of our designers to a design manager so that everything design related went to her. And everything on the production side went, I ended up promoting one of my project managers to production manager so that the project managers weren't calling me. They were calling me the production manager. And it really was about reducing ⁓ direct reports. When you scale and you have more employees, ultimately as owners,

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: most people, especially at the two and three million dollar range, everybody reports to you, you're the boss. Then you start going to the five to six. Now when you have like 10, 12, maybe 15 people, ⁓ gosh, at the time we had 26 people at six million. And I will tell you, I probably had 24 of them answering to me. So we ended up fixing a lot of that. ⁓ But yeah, the middle management layer was just making sure that we were reducing the amount of direct reports coming directly to me. Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: That's good. No, that's clear. That's clear. One of the things we were talking about before we clicked the record button, when we were kind of emailing back and forth, you mentioned these ghost roles. And I think you're hitting on it a little bit, but tell us a little bit about like, what do you mean when you say, as you're scaling, as you're growing, I've come to realize that there's these ghost roles. Tell us about that.

Aj Ballantine: Hmm. Yeah, so we, I think natural evolution into thinking about these ghost roles are just what naturally happens. I think instinctively for business owners as you grow, you you hire one person that does, you know, owners or one thing, but you hire some people in your business to kind of manage to like, you'll hire a marketing and a finance admin, right? Or you'll hire a designer ⁓ and admin to kind of like, Offset the responsibilities of some other things that they really shouldn't be doing long term And then you as you begin to grow you start refining those positions down to kind of chiseling off things You know, I had a designer slash admin So we kind of like as we grew we locked that off and said, okay We're not gonna keep hiring designer slash admins We're gonna we're gonna hire an admin and split the responsibilities between the two and those things are very obvious to us I think where the ghost roles concept started to come into play is that some of the, well probably the less of a leadership thing, and I'll go back to like the five to six million dollar range, is our designers were handling everything from ⁓ making selections, going on sales appointments, making selections and doing the design work to sell the job. then ultimately walking that customer through making all of the selections, actually placing the orders, logging them into job tread and then making sure that the project managers have what they needed ⁓ from the selection standpoint. And they were bogged down. They obviously had reached their full bandwidth and we were looking at hiring two more designers. And I really started getting five Ys. Why are they so bogged down? Can we approach this little differently? And then I realized that a lot of what they were doing actually was a different type of role. Like designers can handle all the things I just said. But what we saw was that maybe 30 to 40 % or more of their time was actually just handling procurement and pre-construction management. we said, OK, well, what if we hired someone that could do all of our cabinet double checks, all of our cabinet orders, track these things, handle all receiving, handle deliveries to job sites, handle, you know, logging things into job tread the appropriate way and even shopping for these things and creating purchase orders. So we hired a production coordinator that works hand-to-hand with the designers and that role won't get into it, but that role has also evolved since. But again, that saved us from hiring two more designers and it was one role that actually took some of the weight off of my production team as well because this construction ⁓ coordinator, production coordinator also handled all of my warranty. So any jobs that will call in say, hey, we're reaching our one year warranty. Can we have you guys come out and fix these drywall cracks? ⁓ Lori is her name, production coordinator. She handles all of that. And now the project managers don't have to worry about fielding that stuff as well. Because that stuff would get lost in the cracks. ⁓

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. So what we're talking about some of this is another way putting it would be to be evaluating the capacity that each of these roles have, identifying, like you mentioned, hey, let's lop this off. Let's just make this a little bit more of a purebred, this is the role versus, I'm using the dog analogy, I don't know for the dog lovers if this is appropriate, but more of a mutt type role where a little this, little that, let's make this more purebred. And. You know, going back to couple of things you said, when, we're at capacity, we have a few options. We can either reduce work. We can improve systems. Sometimes we don't need to hire somebody. We just need to improve systems. We need to add people. Sometimes we think, you know, ⁓ we just need to add somebody. And that's exactly right. Other times we need to add people and shift responsibilities. This is the big thing that I, that I hope everybody's hearing is don't get weary. from evaluating your team's roles. A huge part of your job as the leader of a growing remodeling company is to be paying very close attention to the strategic part of this. Are people over capacity? Could this be simplified if we take that off the designer's plate and hire somebody that can do that full time? Don't get weary from this shifting roles. You mentioned like, that role has evolved. over the years because we learned this and we learned that. Don't fall in love with what got you here. Be willing to kind of break it, to test it, to try some new things. And I think sometimes as business owners, we almost look at that as a failure. It's like, I set up isn't working. No, no, no, no. It was working. You found issues with it and you're wise enough as a leader to continue to make adjustments, continue to shift, continue to evolve. And I'm hearing that I'm hearing that a lot in what you're saying and I think sometimes we take that as a negative instead of a positive.

Aj Ballantine: If there's one thing that I hope everyone takes from this, it's this story here is my team used to get frustrated almost with me because I would make a decision that I thought was right and then ultimately would need to be refined, tweaked or even redone. ⁓ And I have never been afraid to walk back ⁓ one of my decisions and say, well, that didn't work. So let's reproach it. And I would lose no time. I've never been like, I don't care if someone gives me their, told you so like, okay, yeah, you told me so like, Hey, let's, let's move in this direction. Now my team used to actually get a little frustrated because it's like, Oh, like here we are. Okay. So now we're, now we're going to go off and do this thing. But the one thing that they've learned over the course of time is that that is how we operate here at this company. This that's part of our values here is that we will go off and try something, especially if we feel very convicted about it, we'll go off and try it. And if it fails, you're not getting fired for it.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: That was a valiant effort. All right, let's regroup. Let's start again. I have developed risk takers in this business that five years ago, they were ⁓ very much, maybe not opposed, but definitely skeptical when I would lean on these ideas. Now they're coming up with some of their own and they're not afraid to present them and say, I think this is gonna work. It's because of the culture that we built through this, let's try it. It failed, no big deal. Try it again. Again, the asterisk here is know your risks, know what the risks are associated with those things, but ultimately, you can take them, you can learn quick, fail fast and learn quick. That's a really good culture to have, especially as you grow because this next layer that I'm sure you're gonna ask me about is this 10 plus million dollar range where we have a leadership layer.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, and I am gonna ask you about it. I also am respecting your time because I think we're a little over the time, but if you had, do we have another 10 minutes? Okay, 10 more minutes. The big finish is what we call this, folks. And you're gonna, yeah, share it with us. All right, we got through that duplicating roles, looking at that middle management, getting the little corporaties. We need to come up with a new name for that. We need to change that to something positive. You got anything?

Aj Ballantine: Yeah, I do. I know. Not off the top of my head, I'm not that quick of a thinker.

Kyle Hunt: professional, professional, professionalized. It's just professionalizing. Of course you do regular, you know, sit downs. Of course you do one-on-ones. Of course you have accountability. You're running a professional company. So that's a little bit something. But you get, yeah, you get into kind of where you're at now and where you're going. What were some of the big changes to get, and you doubled, you almost are doubling your revenue with not doubling the people. What has been the key to where you're at now?

Aj Ballantine: Yeah. We had 20, 24, 26 people at 6 million. And now we were at, we just did 10 million. We're shooting for 11 and we have, we had 18 now we're up to 20, 21. So actually less people at twice as much revenue. That was systems. That was systems. And good management. Yes.

Kyle Hunt: Interesting. that systems and then was it also, was it trade partnering out more of your production side? Okay.

Aj Ballantine: Yes, really good systems. And so we moved up market, we started going after higher dollar jobs. So less jobs at a higher value means good margins as well as ⁓ people, homeowners to manage at the same time.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Aj Ballantine: It also helps keep, know, when I get this question sometimes with guys that are knowing, okay, do I just grow with like the smaller 50, $60,000 jobs or do I try to go after the big ones? I'll say you can do both. Just imagine our job size of 250 versus 50 and you want to do $10 million. You have five times more receipts, at least five times. Five times more homeowners, five times more transactions, accounts payable, accounts receivable. lot of tracking, your finance department's gonna be bigger. So just think about that. But yeah, so yes, going to this stage where we're at the 10 to $11 million. And a little cliff note here is I am not involved in the business. I am not tactically involved. I'm a part of a quarterly strategy meeting. It's a full day that I do with my executive team. And then I'm usually texting or...

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: know, fielding phone calls from my general manager, you know, through the week or through the month, but generally out of the picture. Uh, on the concept of ghost roles, this is where, uh, so the ghost roles is actually knitting it together really well with kind of what I was just mentioning about our culture for developing and kind of leaders and risk takers from within the organization is that, uh, some of those ghost roles that appeared at that nine, $10 million mark, um, were truly like. ghost roles. had no idea what I was looking for. ⁓ When I started to take a step back from the business, and this was out of necessity, as we talked about, intentional about protecting my time with my family and with a software company that's growing in the triple digits year over year. ⁓ I started to take a step back and realized that

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: Although I replaced myself in every other role, every other capacity from sales, marketing, finance, production, pre-construction, architecture, you name it, I had people in every single one of those seats. But my organization was limping and it was ⁓ all of the things that you don't realize you do that the value that you add to your business until all of sudden you're suffocating the business without them is I was making tactical decisions, right? Tactical decisions that other people in my business were hired to make, but with the strategic mindset of knowing where the business was going. So now all of a sudden, I'm seeing my sales guy not accelerate or decelerate in the sales motion based on movements that the business was making or movements that the economy was making. ⁓ very reactionary towards cash flow that because we got held up on this one job, now we're not seeing $100,000 for another month. What can we do to offset that push this level over here? I started to realize that, you know, I hired a general manager for the business that I needed to equip to be able to analyze a lot of those things that I was doing. But even on the sales side, I didn't realize how important for me it was not just to replace me as a sales guy, but also to replace me as a sales manager. And oftentimes those are not the same person, you know, as well as I do, you know, really good sales guys, usually not a really good sales manager. They're two different personalities. Fortunately for me, that was the same person. And now we're hiring underneath of that person with sales consultants, sorry, project consultants that go off and do sales, but ghost roles, unanticipated little things that come up that you need to hire or train.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, and that's, and that's where like the, the challenges and the problems have evolved into like, wow, I didn't even hardly see it. This idea that I was almost unconsciously competent when it came to tying together the strategic and the tactical side of things. Now that I'm here and I'm seeing my team members here, they're doing a lot of the tactics side, but they're lacking that strategic side. And frankly, it's higher stakes than it's ever been before. Even for you, it's a different strategic outlook than.

Aj Ballantine: folks to be able to do.

Kyle Hunt: than in those other stages. So that was that general manager role, ⁓ really, really the last big key for you to being able to step back. And then you recognize, all right, I've really got to pour some strategic knowledge into that role.

Aj Ballantine: Yeah, yes, 100%. And moreover, it's not necessarily a strategy from like, here's we're going to go in a year. Strategy from like an influence standpoint, right? When we're making tactical decisions on a day to day or a week to week, or even a month to month basis about how, I guess, all the pivots that we just instinctively make, that it's really hard to hire someone to do that. How to position the business a little

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Aj Ballantine: differently because, okay, well, we're doing these eight things. Six of them are working well. One of them's working almost too well. One of them's not working well enough. How do those two things influence? It's like the spoken web, right? A concept where you need someone who knows that if you pull over here, it's going to actually pull these three things down here. And gosh, that's just, it's hard to replicate that if your desire is to set back from your business. Most business owners I talk to at 10, 12 million dollars, They are still that strategic decision maker, you know, in the business and like kind of where I was when I replaced all my roles. That's actually where I love to be. I love to be the guy who's like, okay, let me, let me push and pull here and here. But if your desire is to step back from the business, you got to think long and hard about who, okay, now who's going to be pulling those levers. Cause that's a role that doesn't really, doesn't really exist without you unless you're very intentional about developing that in the organization.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. How'd you find, how'd you find your person for that?

Aj Ballantine: Would you believe that it was my designer admin that I hired. One of my first, my first office hire was Lauren Weber. so through the years, she kind of came up through the ranks from a cultural perspective. She cares about people more than she cares about dollars. And that was really important for me. So what I always said in hiring is like, I will hire a character over experience. There are things I can teach you and things that I cannot. And so I put my money where my mouth was. know, when I needed a general manager to take over the business, there were things that Lauren did not know from ⁓ a business management perspective, right? She had a really good finger on the pulse on everything, ⁓ business operations, but there was obviously a more intricate layer. So it was intentional. We got her in with some great minds. I got her coaching and I spent some intentional time working with her to teach her some of the things. the way that I handle issues to really hand that off to her. But she's gone from my first hire all the way up to running the business. And now she tells me what to do, what I'm allowed to spend money on. So it's actually a really great friction.

Kyle Hunt: That's fun. That's Very cool. I was hoping that this conversation was going to unveil and offer some good clarity to folks of what these stages look like. And I think it absolutely delivered that. I think we emphasized a lot kind of going through, going through the different stages. And, you know, I think, I think the clearer we are, even if you're, even if you don't ever go into the 10 or 11 plus million range for you to have more clarity on what each stage requires and what each step requires. will only help in whatever stage you are in. By the way to everybody listening, this is your race that you're running. I'm not AJ, I'm not AJ Valentine. ⁓ We probably have similar traits in a lot of different entrepreneurial ways, but the business that I wanna build is different than the business that you're gonna build. And also, five years from now, that might shift. Everybody listening to this, you're running your race. You are trying to figure out what is going to work for you, for your family, for your life. And there's the beautiful thing about this industry is there's so many different ways to be successful. But if you are desiring to grow it and your why behind it is true to you and authentic and good, then hopefully this recording and this podcast gave you some more clarity on how you can get there. ⁓ AJ, I was thinking about this at the tail end of this. I'm going, you know what? I'm, busy, but I'm not as busy as AJ. And I sent a note to AJ or Bailey did or Cassie did, can't remember. And you said, of course, I'd be happy to do this. You don't have to spend the last hour hobnobbing on the illustrious remodelers on the Rise show. You are investing this time because you care about the industry and you care about people. And as I was listening to you offer your last tidbit, I'm like, I ought to be a more thankful person. I ought to say, AJ, thank you for sharing your knowledge. Thank you for being willing to do this. You didn't have to do this. ⁓ And that just that feeling kind of I was just feeling that very heavily. So thank you I'm very I'm very impressed by what you've been able to build and more than that just your heart behind sharing it And what a success what it what a key I think thread of success in business and life is to be very very much a servant's heart share get Don't, the next time you go, don't know if I want to tell that person cause they might figure out this and they're kind of a competitor and I know I'm seeing them at an HBA meeting. Just share. It's going to come back to you in spades the more you are generous and ⁓ the more that you share. So thank you for modeling that for us. You fine sir.

Aj Ballantine: I could say the same about you. Thanks for sharing all of the wonderful things ⁓ that you share with the industry to make the industry better. Yeah, it's always a pleasure to chat with you on a friendship basis, but especially on a podcast where there's other folks listening in. If I can be helpful, I think that's a great win for everybody. I don't know everything. There are still things I'm learning on a day-to-day basis. I don't have everything right, ⁓ but... ⁓

Kyle Hunt: Nah, but...

Aj Ballantine: You know, that's one of the things that I would suggest for anybody who's still here is just making sure that, you know, you're always challenging your beliefs. Fail publicly. Don't be afraid to fail publicly. You know, and what I mean by that is don't be afraid to fail in front of your team or have like this idea that ⁓ you really invested in, you know, fall flat or, you know, bomb. Learn from it, pivot quickly, pick it up. develop that culture in your company, even if your desire is only to stay at two million, I think that is really clutch ⁓ to developing a strong culture. Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: I like that. like that. ⁓ All right. then give the 30 second render commercial. Bet you there's going to be like seven people that listen to this and hear the render thing and like, ⁓ I should go check that out. Give them a little pitch.

Aj Ballantine: Render was truly designed out of my own design build needs to reduce manual entry at place in the part where I mentioned we went from two to six and then six to 10 and that those jumps were all about increasing efficiencies. ⁓ Render is a ladder based application that allows us to replicate the entire consultation experience. So think about sketching on a piece of graph paper or taking measurements and taking notes from a homeowner. That can all be done on a phone now with LIDAR. ⁓ And we developed workflows. So the integrations we have with 2020 Chief Architect and JobTread and BuildExact are ⁓ pretty incredible to go from scanning a room, having a Chief Architect as built in 30 seconds and a JobTread estimate in 30 seconds. That's the power we want to give to the industry. And we just launched ⁓ Render Flex. It's in public beta. Launching fully this summer, it is a ⁓ lightweight CAD solution. So for those that don't use CAD software, don't want to train a bunch of people on it, or want to put some quick edit functionality in their hands. Render Flex is giving you the ability to actually edit those plans as soon as they're scanned to either dial in ⁓ the measurements or even to mock up custom layouts. And Flex will also be tying into Job Tread. So if you use Job Tread, when you make changes in Flex, your parameters will adjust the design space rather than the as built space, which is going to make estimating a ton more powerful.

Kyle Hunt: Nelly, what do you think people listen to this? You think people listen to this podcast use job tread?

Aj Ballantine: So we're excited about this summer. A lot of great things coming. I imagine a lot of them do. mean, they're growing so fast. It is, yeah, they're growing so fast and they've got a great solution. Like I said, we use it.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, they do. Cause it's really good. Yeah, it's really good. R E N D R.com. Check it out. Ooh, that was the, I liked, I liked your replicating the in-person consult part. That's I like that. I like that language. That makes good sense. Cool. Rock and roll. Keep, keep working hard. Thank you. Thank you for sharing and everybody. If, if you want to learn more about that R E N D R.com. And then what's your remodeling websites, remodeling company's website.

Aj Ballantine: We digitized the entire thing. Yeah. cornerstone.house super easy yeah cornerstone.house

Kyle Hunt: Really? When did you change that?

Aj Ballantine: That was in 2020.

Kyle Hunt: Interesting. I always, I'm like, ⁓ no, dot com is the way to go. But like the idea of just being able to go, Hey, cornerstone dot house. It's kind of nice.

Aj Ballantine: Yeah, it's way easier than ⁓ aj at cornerstone remodeling.com. People will not see some of the extra letters in cornerstone remodeling. yeah, cornerstone.house.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Cool. Thank you, AJ. Have a good one.

Aj Ballantine: Thanks, Kyle.