Business Expansion Plan – TD King
SUMMARY
On this episode, we are here with TD King. He is the owner of MACNAK Construction, which has been on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America for three years in a row.
What TD says is aside from doing the grunt work, the biggest thing that could help your business grow is to understand your clients and competition.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Understanding your clients is a big part of a business’s success.
Do whatever you have to do to gather experience, and build your resume.
Do a lot of research to learn about your industry and your competition.
When starting out, do a lot of partnering with small businesses, or large businesses that might not know as much about what you do.
Train your people to somebody take over your job.
Don’t concentrate on your failures. Those are lessons.
Be critical to where you can learn from your mistake.
Empower your people to make decisions.
TRANSCRIPTION: BUSINESS EXPANSION PLAN – TD KING
Kamala Chambers
On this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to grow and scale a business from a multi-million dollar company owner using a business expansion plan.
Today, we’re here with TD King, the owner of MACNAK Construction. It’s been rated of the top ten fastest-growing companies in the Puget Sound. He’s been on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in America three years in a row.
Welcome, ready to rock the mic.
Luis Congdon
All right, Thriving Launchers, we are here with Terence King.
Terence, are you ready to launch?
TD King
I am ready to launch.
Luis Congdon
So Terence, one of the things that I’ve loved about you and something that interested us here at Thriving Launch to interview you is one, your business is at this incredible growth. You’ve been included in the Inc. 5000, Inc 500 list for three years, one of the fastest growing companies in America three years in a row.
Thriving Launchers, that’s incredibly impressive to make it on the list not just once but to do it three years in a row. With that being said, what are some of the business expansion plan secrets or tips that helped you excel and grow the business in the way that you have?
Business Expansion Plan – Understand Your Clients
TD King
I think the biggest thing is to understand your clients.
I came from the federal government. I flew fighters in the navy, and I was part of procurement, so I understood what the federal government’s limitations were and what they were looking for when I got out of the navy. I think understanding your client is a big part of the business expansion plan.
I knew where they needed help and I knew what contracts at least made their lives more comfortable, and I focused on that.
Luis Congdon
I love that tip. Thriving Launchers, that’s something we talk about a lot, and yet, I find myself having this conversation with clients over and over repeatedly even though we may have had it once because understanding your clients is the key to having a business and it is an essential piece of a business expansion plan.
So once you understood your clients, what was the next business expansion plan step for you?
TD King
Well, in our business, unlike what most people think, most people assumed that the government bids go to the lowest bidder, but that is not how they’re done.
They’re done through what’s called the best value or the lowest price technically acceptable. Those are proposals and past experience.
Business Expansion Plan – Gather Experience
TD King
For me, I had to get the experience to win contracts. What we did is we started bidding work everywhere. We have now done projects in 16 States from New York to Seattle. We hold contracts in Hawaii, but we bid jobs everywhere, and we bid the jobs that most people did not want.
That business expansion plan helped us to grow, helped us to build our track record and our experience, and then we could go after some of this juicier 90 million, and 240 million dollars five-year contracts.
Luis Congdon
Okay. Thriving Launchers, I just want to make a little comment, and I know Kamala has a question.
It doesn’t sound sexy at all Terence. Thriving Launchers, what I heard is Terence said, “We were willing to go out there and do the digging, scoop the poop, and whatever we had to do to get that experience, build that resume, and build that trust.” A lot of us don’t want to do that.
Business Expansion Plan – Be Willing To Do The Grunt Work
Luis Congdon
Honestly, it makes us lazy, or it makes us not willing to have the success because we’re not willing to go through some of the grunt work necessary for the business expansion plan.
Kamala Chambers
Yeah.
I’m curious about the bidding that you did and how it could apply to any business. How would you recommend people go out and find companies across their industry?
Business Expansion Plan – Do A Lot Of Research About Your Industry
TD King
We did a lot of research. A lot of that research went into “Where are the difficult jobs that we can get that people don’t want?” A lot of those jobs were very remote.
We found jobs that were in the field of service that might have been way up on top of the mountaintop doing either a fire lookout or making a trail that was all labor because they wouldn’t allow equipment up there. Those are the kinds of jobs that nobody wanted. That was how we built our federal contracting record.
The other business expansion plan was we looked for clients in other contractors. We found other companies that held contracts. Because they’ve been in the business for so long, they’ve kept contracts that they weren’t that experienced in. I remember one of them was a construction contract that a remediation company held. It was an energy and ground remediation company.
Business Expansion Plan – Treat Competition As A Client
TD King
We had won this contract for doing construction, so when we showed up, and we were at the guys that built these things, they handed their contract to us. If there was anything outside of remediation, they let us handle it. Those contracts were very lucrative, and in that case, we were treating our competition as a client.
But the biggest thing I think is getting out and learning about the industry, and getting to understand both the clients and your competition. That’s a huge part of it.
Kamala Chambers
Now I know you did this all without investors.
Do The Business Expansion Plan Without Investors
Kamala Chambers
Do you have any other tips on how to implement your business expansion plan without the investors?
TD King
We did do it all without investors, and it was hard because, in the beginning, we had one part-time employee, the account man. It was ownership that was out in the field and was doing the work, and one thing that I did a lot of, and I still do to this day is I, partner.
I partner with large businesses that might not know as much about federal contracting. I partner with small companies that might make a different trade than I do and we can help each other to win that work. I’ve done a lot of that in the beginning when were very small. We partnered with other small contractors, and mom and pop shops.
Business Expansion Plan – Do Strategic Partnerships
TD King
When we got a job, I didn’t have to have them on the payroll. We weren’t part of overhead, but when we got a job, they were more than happy to show up and help me to complete that contract.
Luis Congdon
That’s cool. I love partnering up. I think seeing others not as competition but as complementary to whatever we’re up to is the way to go, and strategic partnership is something huge. It’s something that most well-known marketers worth something like 30 billion dollars, Jay Abraham, talks a lot about strategic alliances and strategic partnerships. That’s very smart.
Terence, one of the questions I have for you is how you inspire your team to go out there and do the grunt work. I imagine it wasn’t like an overnight success. I guessed you had to do some of these not lucrative and not sexy jobs for a while.
TD King
Yeah, exactly.
I think this is part of me coming from the fighter pilot world where everybody’s type A.
I was an instructor for 12 years. I was an adversary instructor. I was just flying a single sea fighter, but I instructed students, and we did Top Gun as part of air wing classes.
Business Expansion Plan – Empower People
TD King
I got my training techniques and leadership style from those years, and basically, I empower people. It’s similar to your flight wing. He’s got his fighter and is flying his fighter, and you’re flying your fighter. You’re on the same team, but you are operating autonomously.
I empower my people and one mantra that I’ve always used and the military uses is “You’re training everybody to run the operation or the facility or the military someday.” Everybody’s training to someday run the entire ball of wax. I’ve always said to people that I’m training everybody here to take over my job someday.
I’m training my people to somebody take over my job.
One part of that is empowering people. Even further than that, the way I look at is if we both understand where the goal is, you’re going to get there wholly different way than I am. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
Business Expansion Plan – Train Your People
TD King
If I dictate process, then I can’t evaluate, and this is for a leader only.
If I dictate process, I can’t evaluate the performance of a potential leader.
The reason is I’m telling that future leader what to do, and how to do it.
If I would someday want to be on the beach in Turks and Caicos, and turn my cell phone off and turn my tablet off, I can’t have people back at the office that need to call to ask me simple questions. They need to feel like they can make that decision and if it goes badly, okay, that’s a failure that we just paid for together, let’s not make the same failure twice.
Kamala Chambers
Such a critical tip right there is how we can work ourselves out of a job. That’s pretty much the goal when you’re implementing business expansion plan, right?
TD King
Yeah, exactly.
Kamala Chambers
That’s something that we strive towards and that we’re doing more and more in our business too.
I’d love to hear what the most important thing you’ve learned through all of this that you would tell business owners to apply right away is.
Business Expansion Plan – Failures As Lessons
TD King
Don’t concentrate on your failures. Those are lessons. You paid for them just like you paid for school or your pilot’s license, or whatever it is.
TD King
I’m very critical of my performance, and I ask people in the room to be critical. That’s probably something that also comes from my fighter pilot days where if you didn’t call out your mistake, someone else is going to, and it was going to be embarrassing, so you always wanted to call out your mistake first.
Business Expansion Plan – Be Critical
TD King
I think being critical but not overly critical where you’re down in the dumps if you make a mistake, but essential to where you can learn from that mistake, pull it apart, see where you might have been at fault because you can’t control other people. You can only control yourself.
Where could you have been at fault? What could you have done to avoid that? And learn as much as possible from the mistake.
Luis Congdon
When I hear that, I think about how powerful it is to have that level of ownership. I know in every kind of relationship that I have, if something goes array, the more I can analyze and go, “Where did I go wrong?”
Business Expansion Plan – Have Ownership
Luis Congdon
A small example here Thriving Launchers, something that happened to me for a while, and it kept repeating. I just didn’t understand it. People weren’t showing up on time for podcast interviews. I had clients that maybe wouldn’t show up for a meeting, and podcast guests. Clients would say, “Oh, it wasn’t on my calendar.” “Oh, “I didn’t get a reminder.” or, “Oh, I forgot to put it on there.”
Small little mistake, and I would want to go, “But I emailed you the times.” That would happen, and I would still wonder why it wasn’t happening. Then, I realized, “Well, how about I also not only just email the times, but I also put it on my calendar, invite them on the calendar with it, set-up a reminder that reminds them of the date and time.”
Now, if anybody said, “Well, I didn’t get a reminder.” I’d say, “Well, you did get a reminder.” “Well, it wasn’t on my calendar.” “Well, I sent you a calendar invite, and you clicked that you were going to it so that it would have automatically gone to your calendar.”
Again, the impetus for that issue kept happening. I could look at myself and say, “What am I not doing again? Do I need to start texting people? Do I need to change my clients?” That level of ownership shifts things.
When I think about you talking like that, I think how powerful it would be to be part of a team like that.
TD King
We have minimal turn over unless we have to ask them to leave, but yeah, I think it is good.
Business Expansion Plan – Create Feeling Of Entrepreneurship For Employees
TD King
It also creates I think in the employees more feeling of ownership and entrepreneurship. They’re out there, they’re making decisions, and that feels good.
Luis Congdon
I’m curious. One last question here because I’m interested.
You guys have I think three different offices now, so you’ve grown, and you do projects all over the country. What’s one of the biggest shifts that you’ve had to make? Because in scaling, we have to change like being kind more of a mom and pops or local business as a particular kind of requirement.
Now, once we scale, have multiple offices, and we can’t always be there, what’s one of the biggest changes that you’ve had to make?
TD King
I think one thing that’s been nice is I always have followed that military doctrine of, “If this guy goes down, the guy behind him steps in his place.”
I’ve hired guys that came here, and they were laborers. We’ve got one guy that’s a project manager now that no kidding, one of the first things he did was wash cars, but we just bring him along. We rarely get rid of people. We will shift them to different seats. If we do identify that someone’s knocking, we get rid of them quickly.
Business Expansion Plan – Create Processes and Procedures
TD King
One thing that we’ve done I think well from the beginning is to create processes and procedures and then to bring people up through our system as they promote so that whether they’re in Hawaii or New York, they know what’s happening, what’s going on, and what we’re doing. I think that’s been a big part of it.
We follow the same processes whether we’re doing a three million dollar home in Gig Harbor Washington or we’re doing a 30 million dollar barracks in Hawaii for [indiscernible] that joint based Pearl Harbor.
We follow the same systems. It does change a little bit when we bring on a JV partner, but our JV partners have all been with us for a very long time. We haven’t ever bid with a joint venture partner unless we’ve been doing work with them for several years.
I think that helps when you’re starting to grow and starting to do multiple projects in multiple states just trying to keep it all simple.
Business Expansion Plan – Empower People To Make Decisions
TD King
I will say one thing that is a huge part of all of this is empowering your people to make decisions. I only have to deal with the things that are big, and that is huge. It allows me to focus on developing the company.
I think one of the things we talked about was that we recently won the Puget Sound Business Journal Innovation Award, and that is entirely outside of federal. I think we shocked a lot of people when we won that, but that was the stuff we were working on outside of federal because I had time to.
Had I had to be involved in every contract, and my people didn’t make their own decisions and make good ones, then there would be no way that we could have broadened into those other areas.
Kamala Chambers
There we have it. We’re here with Terence King. We’ve been talking about not only business expansion plan, and how to grow a company, but how you scale it to such significant levels.
Business Expansion Plan Takeaways
Kamala Chambers
Thriving Launchers, I’ve gotten a lot out of this episode about business expansion plan. I hope you have too. Some of the biggest takeaways for me is looking for ways that you could empower your people to take over and make decisions rather than you trying to do it all yourself. I know Dave Asprey talked about that a lot in that episode, which is fantastic.
Another one is about how you can put yourself out there in a big way. Maybe you need to bid everywhere and put out pitches everywhere, and just see what lands, and perhaps be willing to work in the trenches a little bit as you’re growing.
Thank you so much for tuning in and keep thriving everyone.
