We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brandon Drake. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brandon below.

Hi Brandon, thanks for joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

Scaling up is one of the most difficult things a business owner can face. At the beginning of your business venture, you’re the face of the company. You also are executing the work. So from marketing to sales and accounting, logistics, to field work, and finally completion, you have control over the whole process. In addition to the actual problem of finding qualified and reliable employees, you also have the mental aspect of learning to “let go”.

After the first couple years of working mostly alone for 14-16 hours a day, and 6-7 days a week, I had established enough cash flow and work to start to grow. After what was a great partner abruptly left after getting cold feet when it was time to leave his full time iob, it put me into a corner where I had to hire. I hired and worked with several people over the course of the first 3 years. Most don’t work out, as it seems to be the rule for me anyway, that if you hire 3-4, you keep 1 in this industry after 6 months if you’re lucky.

My initial strategy was to find 2 reliable people that I could work with daily, while running my estimates and doing my other work in the evenings and late into the night. I was very fortunate to find a great employee fairly quickly, and had worked with him directly for almost a year so he was pretty well trained in the processes and also the work of most remodel scenarios. This allowed me to now start to hire helpers until we found one that was good enough to make our first 2 person crew. I was able to do that and eventually, let go and do check ins at end of day and job site visits 1-2 times a week which allowed me to focus on growing and running the business. After that first hurdle, I finally was a business owner, instead of just owning a job.

After that, my strategy was to eventually train a person on that crew well enough to lead a 2nd crew and hire helpers for both. This strategy grew us from my garage and $150,000 in revenue to $1.4 million and counting with 3 crews, a retail show room, office building and warehouse with a fleet of work vehicles, heavy equipment, and tools that I only dreamed of having when I started this business.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

So I came from a very small “holler” village in between two very small towns, Kermit and Crum, in West Virginia. We grew up with a roof over our heads, and two great parents who worked hard and instilled a work ethic in me and my siblings. We had it better than they did as children, and my goal growing up was to try to the same with my children.

Where I grew up necessitated the need to problem solve and do things for yourself because there isn’t anyone else to do it. I learned alot from my Dad and also our high school had a vocational program for building construction which I took full advantage of and learned a great deal about construction in my high school years.

After high school, I moved to Huntington, and attended Marshall while working at Wal-Mart from 4pm-1am unloading trucks. In my spare time, I did some woodworking and always still loved doing work like that. Fast forward through a degree in business, and a corporate career that involved great sales training, and business acumen in management, I just hit the wall after my wife had a serious disease pop up, aplastic anemia, which resulted in a lengthy stay in the hospital and life changing consequences. We moved back home with her parents, and we started again from the bottom, buried in debt. I leaned on my experience and started our business as a side hustle, doing any job I could on the evening and on weekends while I worked full time.

After 3 years of that, I decided to take the risk and do the business full time.

I primarily focused on remodels. Bathrooms, kitchens, flooring. Really anything I could get. I remember our first contracts were $150 for flooring a single small room. But I did it and had many nights go into 9-10pm, knowing this was a foundation for greater things.

What sets me apart, is sales experience to go with technical know how and problem solving skills. This allows me to build trust, understand and listen to customers needs, while being able to take those wants and dreams and turn them into a plan to achieve them. Many times, working with a budget requires creative solutions as well. The sales aspect also gave me the skills I need to be able to do this, and actually close the sale with customers by building trust and value, instead of just coming in and giving them a “bid”.

As for what I’m most proud of in my professional career, that is hands down being able to have the means to listen to God’s calling on my heart and give back to our community in big ways, and help those that need it most. We’ve been able to do small things like sponsor youth leagues, and coaching them to donating to my old highschool to buy training equipment for athletics, to buying 50-100 complete meals for people back home during the holidays. We were also very blessed to be able to help with recent flood relief efforts, and donate nearly a semi truck load of supplies to WVians in need, and even build a new home for free for a family in need, along with many other amazing people who God lead to help do it. I believe God puts us where we need to be and puts these things on your heart when you’re meant to be that person for someone else.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Absolutely. When I first imagined this business, it was to provide hvac services. I had many hiccups in that first 6 months, and after struggling with many things from not having the ability to hire reliable employees or find help, to tool and logistics issues, I had to pivot from that to inside remodeling work and completely change paths. It’s important to realize when things aren’t working out and make adjustments when you can.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

This one is an interesting question, because i believe this is one of the things that stands in the way of so many chasing their dreams.

The reality is, most of us are never going to have enough money saved. We aren’t going to ever have just that little bit of debt to pay off first. You’re NEVER going to be in the perfect position to start your business. It’s never going to be risk free. While sure, it’s nice to start your business with $20,000 in the bank and no debt, but you may end up losing your opportunity by focusing too much on reasons why NOT to start your business than reasons to start it.

I started with $400 in the bank, I’ll never forget it. I resigned my full time job with $400 to my name. I will say that I planned that hard out date 2 months before. I started running estimates and booking them starting on that date, and I had 4 weeks of work booked up when that day hit. I quit just like I had committed to doing. It wasn’t perfect timing but it’s never going to be. I bought tools I needed and nearly everything for the first year was just me taking that money and investing it into the business. We didn’t go out to eat, we didn’t go on vacation, we didn’t do anything extra. It was a tough time, full of sacrifices for the future.

I always tell people, everything you want in life, is on the other side of fear.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.affordablecontractingwv.com
• Facebook: https://Facebook.com/affordablecontractingsolutions