I think this area is phenomenal.
First off, we've got the major highways.
We've got 75, 23, 69.
So living here or working here, you can get to anywhere quickly.
And if you live just outside of here, getting to here is really easy.
Everyone loves working here.
We have the most phenomenal team.
I mean, these guys would kill themselves for their clients.
And our clients know that.
And that's why our clients stay with us for so many years.
Now how the culture got to where it's at, I wish I had that secret formula.
Because I would write a book and make millions.
But what I would say is to treat your employees like they're family.
Something we put in place at Spud years ago is we only hire senior developers.
Which means they have to have five years real-world experience.
Now, we've never really pushed for they gotta have a degree, they've gotta have the certification or anything like that.
But they got to have five years real-world experience.
They got to be able to show us they know what they're doing.
So what we put in place recently is I worked with an organization in Flint called 100K Ideas.
And what we're doing is we're starting a Spud Academy,
where we're going to be bringing in junior developers
where we're going to teach them not just our way of doing business, but the entire business process.
Because it's one thing to be able to write code.
You're basically taking the English language and putting it into a different language
and it makes the computer work.
Well, there's a lot more to it.
You got to be able to do the flow charting, the wire frames, the design specs,
and understand those things and the database structures.
And so we put them through this academy program that teaches those things.
And then our goal is that either they'll hopefully stay here or,
if we don't have room for them here right now, we help them find another job somewhere else.
I waited too long to build this building.
The building we're in now.
I actually bought the land two years before I built it.
It was for sale a few years before then.
And I always had cold feet about it.
I was nervous.
But what this building has done for us as a whole...
I mean, people have marketing budgets,
and you know, you spend money on your SEO, your website
and your brochures, literature, leave-behinds and all that stuff.
Well, what I'm paying monthly for this building on a mortgage
has paid for itself ten-fold.
Because this is our best marketing piece.
When the clients come here and they go through the building
and they see on our walls our entire process and procedures
that are in place, and how well organized we are that way.
It's really made a huge difference than our previous building that we were in for 15 years.
I guess one of my mistakes is overthinking things, procrastinating a little bit
And when you know it's the right thing to do, just go for it and stick with it and make it happen.
Well, my wife runs Lucky Day Animal Rescue, and she's done that for a lot of years now.
I help her with that stuff and get involved.
We've got a 96-acre farm we bought for the animal rescue,
and it's grown from doing domestic animals to now doing farm animals.
So when we're not at Spud working, we're working on the farm.
Bangkok Peppers. I mean, you can ask anyone, I eat there a lot more than I should.
But I can't say enough great things about them.
They have consistent, fresh, good food.
And in downtown Grand Blanc, there's - on Tuesdays - the music stuff going on.
I know the first Friday of the month, they have the food trucks here,
which is kind of cool bringing that stuff in.
And just bringing people from the community out to hang out.
We just do all kinds of stuff.
I can't say enough about always bettering yourself, reading,
getting with other business groups/organizations and learning from them.
Because one of the things entrepreneurs do is we learn by writing checks.
I know we make mistakes and we pay for them whatever way that is.
Whether it's a bad vendor, a bad decision we made, a bad hire.
Whatever it is, that's how we learn.
So if you can get with other business organizations and learn from their mistakes
and share with them something you've done and save them
it saves you many, many, many mistakes.
So I think sticking with it and finding like-minded people to hang out with,
that's important.
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