29: Start Taking Action in Your Business and Let Go of Fear
Behind Their Success: Ep 29
Ron Nussbaum: [00:00:00] The universe is never wrong, but it's up to us to take the action and create the outcome
Welcome to behind their success. This podcast is for people who are feeling stuck on their entrepreneur journey or in their careers. It's for people who want to scale and grow their businesses, learn about the power of mindset, or they just know there's more out there and they want to start making changes.
Paden Squires: I'm Paden Squires, the host of the podcast. I was never cut out to be an employee. And when I was an employee, I was bored out of my mind. So I made a plan. I studied and passed the CPA exam in eight months while working all with the end goal in mind of quitting my job and starting my own business. I did that in 2014 and it has been an amazing wild ride since.
Paden Squires: So now let's hear from other entrepreneurs and what mindsets and probably more important, what actions they have taken that have created and led to their success.
Paden Squires: Hello everybody. Welcome back to behind their success podcast. I am Paden Squires, the host, and [00:01:00] today we have Ron Nussbaum. He founded builder comms, a communication platform tailored for the construction industry, aiming to revolutionize how builders and contractors communicate and collaborate on projects.
Paden Squires: Additionally, he hosts. The Construction Champions Podcast, where he engages in insightful conversations with industry leaders and experts. His mission is to challenge traditional norms, drive innovation, and inspire positive change in the construction sector. Ron, welcome to the podcast.
Ron Nussbaum: It is great to be here.
Ron Nussbaum: Thank you for having me.
Paden Squires: Yeah, absolutely. Ron. So, um, introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about what you do, currently.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah. So I currently, I spent, I got out in the Marine Corps in 2011 or 2010 and I ended up in residential construction. I've done everything from digging the hose to running the company.
Ron Nussbaum: And that led me to developing a software, a communication platform. For the construction industry, I like to say it's if Slack and Dropbox hooked up [00:02:00] on a weekend and had to be a baby for the construction industry, that would be builder comms. So that's what I do now. It's what I've done for the past year and a half.
Ron Nussbaum: I bought this product from. A napkin to concept, to market, to paying users. And we actually, this year, we were just a top 20 startup for the International Builders Show, the IBS show in Vegas, which is the biggest residential construction trade show in the world. so it was a great honor to do that.
Ron Nussbaum: And I just rock and roll, man. I get shit done.
Paden Squires: I can't dude. Absolutely, man. give us, a little more detailed, your background. you got out of the Marine Corps and you started working in the construction industry. give us a little more color to that and ultimately how you ended up creating the software.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah, absolutely. Dive right into that. So I've done everything from literally digging the holes. To run an eight figure a year construction business, a couple hundred [00:03:00] employees. And during that time I've dealt with some off homeowners and I got tired of that. Like I just.
Ron Nussbaum: I really dove into why, not just us, but why does the construction industry as a whole really have a bad reputation when it comes to customer experience?
Paden Squires: And
Ron Nussbaum: What I found was it was very rarely the guys, it was very rarely the work. It was all communication and documentation around these projects. I was always the person in the driveway getting my ass chewed, but I had nothing to do.
Ron Nussbaum: Like it was out of my hands until that moment, and I was like, Okay. So this is just wrong for many lovers. How do we fix this? And one night I was laying in bed and it just hit me. It was like, if I had software that worked as air traffic control and just got the right people talking to each other. So if there was a scheduling [00:04:00] question, the customer was actually talking to the person in charge of the schedule.
Ron Nussbaum: They weren't talking to Mary, the receptionist or Steve, the sales guy. they were actually, we create these conversations that need to happen with the right people. So there's no longer any of them, he said, she said, and then we create the documentation that goes with it. So by getting everything in one place, getting it out of the emails, getting it out of the text messages, we now create these channels of communication with the living, breathing records of pictures, documents. It's really hard to become a data center for these construction projects. All this stuff that is typically scattered everywhere. You have all the emails and text messages. You have all the papers sitting on everybody's desk. And then the photos that are just on everybody's phones throughout the company, what we did was we just made a simple place.
Ron Nussbaum: To put it all that, where a photo is a [00:05:00] photo, a document is a document, and a conversation is a conversation. And if it doesn't happen in BuilderComs, it just didn't happen. And that is what we created, and we're really a piece of software that walks alongside the other project management software. What I built was where every piece of software failed me.
Ron Nussbaum: How do I handle this communication? There's great scheduling stuff out there. There's great software that does all this, but when it comes to how I handle the communications between my customers, the company, everybody involved, all stakeholders, that's where software always lets me down.
Ron Nussbaum: And I just built something super simple. I learned to say no to my developer early on. because I was building something for the construction industry and I understood that it just had to be something that people could be able to use in five to 10 minutes. And that's what we built. That's what builder comms is.
Paden Squires: That's a really cool concept as a guy that has [00:06:00] personally built two different houses in the last, Five years. That sounds amazing.and you're right. Like my experience,my experience wasn't necessarily a terrible one, but I was building in a tough environment, an inflationary environment.
Paden Squires: and the product was great. The people are even good people. The communication was lacking a big time and to get it, It was just tough on my part. I never knew what was going on until last minute was, which just frustrates you guys, and one
Ron Nussbaum: of the problems with that is you as a homeowner don't even quite understand who to reach out to.
Ron Nussbaum: Like you want to get some of these answers. So like we start to facilitate that homeowners love our product because We built out an app that homeowners download and that's where all this stuff interchanges for them so they no longer have to dig through these emails. They don't have to worry about it within a couple of clicks.
Ron Nussbaum: They're talking to the right person at the company when they have a question. And that it just [00:07:00] provides so much transparency and it just gets the stakeholders having the conversations they need to have. I don't know how many times I had guys show up to a job site that wasn't ready. Or the customer waited to ask questions until the crew was on site.
Ron Nussbaum: And that's the worst possible time. Because typically these questions are having changes that are going to delay the project.
Paden Squires: And
Ron Nussbaum: When that happens.in the world that I lived in, like we were at fault no matter what, because we're the construction company.
Paden Squires: Now the responsibility ultimately falls on you, right?
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah. So no matter what, even if it's something that a homeowner could have had a proactive conversation about, if they don't reach out and have that conversation, it delays the project, they're pissed at us. So we had to create, I needed to create this environment where that kind of stuff didn't happen, where homeowners were empowered to reach out and ask the questions because they were new, they were either talking to [00:08:00] that superintendent, that manager, the foreman, somebody that could actually answer project specific questions, or if they had a scheduling question, they weren't calling the sales rep and leaving a voicemail wondering if they were going to get a call back.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. and, when we talk about different businesses and entrepreneurship and everything, on the podcast, it's so much and the more, the longer, the longer I'm in business doing, doing, doing what I do, I realize it's not. It's rarely ever about the work itself, right?
Paden Squires: it's always about relationships and communications. That's really where all the problems stem from is just poor communication.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah, it's not, It's not a construction specific problem. it's definitely across the board.
Paden Squires: Humanity problem.
Ron Nussbaum: I, I think we just over complicate it. Like I use the word simple a lot because that's what we do, I just build a simple [00:09:00] solution and I think too often, we just think it, everything has to be complex and complicated, especially when you start dealing with software.
Ron Nussbaum: And that's not the case, because that's not what people want. I, like myself, and most people, just want something that I can go on, sign up for, if I want to buy the subscription, do the free trial, and just be able to utilize it without having to go through 30 days worth of training. Or any, To me, like that's where software companies are missing the boat.
Ron Nussbaum: And that's why we have a lot of communication breakdowns because the tours out there, people don't like, and they hate, like when I say Slack and Dropbox had a baby. A lot of people use Slack, but I don't run into very many people that like it.
Paden Squires: No, I use it daily. It's all right. That's yeah, that's cool.
Paden Squires: Right. you've had certain levels of success here, right? you've run construction companies, building software companies. What would you say is your number [00:10:00] one skill? Like what leads you to,had the level of success you've had?
Ron Nussbaum: I'm an action taker.
Ron Nussbaum: I get shit done. And that's typically the hardest part. I don't believe stuff has to be 100 percent pretty to start. The main thing is taking that step, taking that action. And I have a, what I tell my team and I tell anybody we bring on is like at builder comms, we have one role that my team has held me accountable to.
Ron Nussbaum: So now I have to hold everybody accountable to if we can have fires on the boat, but we can't sink the ship and I'm an action taker, so that inherently will create some fires when stuff pops up, I would test the waters immediately.
Ron Nussbaum: if I have a thought like let's test the waters real quick, see what happened. As long as it's not something that's going to sink the ship. We can have a sail on fire, like that can get [00:11:00] put out. We can put a new sail up. Who knows? Like we burn that sail down and we put up a sail that's 10 times bigger.
Ron Nussbaum: You don't know, but we can never sink the ship. So I'm an action taker, but I also understand that principle is like, I can never, Entirely sink the ship. Like we can't take action that has too much risk to sink the ship, but we need to be taking action every day. Like we're still in startup mode. I meet with my team . What do we need to do?
Ron Nussbaum: What can we do with the waters? send out some email, whatever that looks like that's just taking action.
Paden Squires: Yeah, that's some really great stuff. And you know, that is, something that I've, you know, I've gone through a little bit of transition in my business where I've really gotten a whole lot more support where just in the last few years, or really in the last year or so of being able to become, less and less of a practitioner and more and more just having the time and space to work on the business.
Paden Squires: And that's almost something I say to [00:12:00] myself every day is like, come in here. And I'm like, okay, let's just start stirring some stuff. Right. Let's start sending some emails. Like just start stirring, start creating some. Something moving, right? and it's so important, like it, especially people that listen to podcasts are into self development.
Paden Squires: So many people get stuck, especially early get stuck in that loop of just consuming information and not necessarily ever taking action. knowledge isn't power. It's a potential power, right? Like you have to take those steps to put it in action.
Ron Nussbaum: No, that's absolutely true. And I think that's why we see so many people get stuck in the ID stage or why we see so many people never decide to make that next step.
Ron Nussbaum: Like I bought and sold a cleaning company with my wife, and that was purely action. The opportunity presented itself. I was like, this isn't going to kill us. if this [00:13:00] completely can bust, it's not going to be whatever. But within 12 months we bought, put in all the systems, put everything together and sold it for five X.
Ron Nussbaum: And it was a great experience. A couple of good things came out of that. My wife doesn't want to work for me.
Ron Nussbaum: And we proved that we could go into something like that. It wasn't distress, but it was complete chaos. The phone was ringing off the hook. But there, it was, it was a completely chaotic environment and
Paden Squires: systems issue all the way. Yeah,
Ron Nussbaum: absolutely. We just, I went in there and helped my wife guide. I guided her and like, here's what we're going to do.
Ron Nussbaum: I need you to do this. And, uh, we did it. And like I said, 12 months later, we sold it for five X, what our initial investment was. but that was purely action. if I wasn't willing to say, all right, let's look at this. If we do this, this could be awesome.it's [00:14:00] not going, like I said, it's not going to sink the ship.
Ron Nussbaum: Let's just go do it. And I think most people just get that analyzed and I watched it when we were selling it, like you get in these conversations, people would, are they're too afraid to go to that next level or pull the trigger because they're stuck in that analyzing or people love the ID.
Ron Nussbaum: And I think some people, you have to really ask yourself, like, am I meant to be an entrepreneur or am I more of an intrapreneur?I think I have a lot of great both of those in me. Like I'm really good at working. In a company, growing a company, scaring a company, and I'm really good out on my own, as well.
Ron Nussbaum: But you have to ask yourself, is that like the stress levers and all? It's a lot higher when you're out doing it on your own. I think that's why people like it, it's hard to pull that trigger. you're constantly. There's a lot of fights that you have to [00:15:00] have and it's okay. Like if you're, if you're like that.
Ron Nussbaum: You're finding it really hard to pull the trigger on something or take that action. I would examine that because you can make a lot of money working for somebody and growing somebody else's business, but you have to be all in on that. Like you can't be thinking, I might want to go do this. I have this ID.
Ron Nussbaum: You gotta make a decision and then take action. I say a lot that the universe is never wrong. But it's up to us to take action and create the outcome. Like we're in the right places at the right time, but we have to take action and we have to create the outcome.
Paden Squires: Yeah. That's interesting.
Paden Squires: You know, you're able to work inside of the business and then also outside of the business. I think that's a unique skillset. You know, a lot of the entrepreneurs that I know have grown large businesses. They'd all get fired their first day in the inside of a bus.
Paden Squires: Because they have that high self confidence. They [00:16:00] have that driving ability and that, trying to put some reins on them. they're not usually big fans of that.
Ron Nussbaum: Well, you know, and I think it's about the environment that you allow yourself to be in. It's not necessarily about having reins on you and I'm talking a lot more to the people that, when we're talking the indecisiveness there is like either pull the trigger one way or the other, because you're like living in purgatory, like you have this ID, it's not, and this isn't, I'm going to say something here that like, Probably gonna piss some people off, but like, there's no glory in just having an ID to talk about it.
Ron Nussbaum: When you're out with your buddies hanging out or you're at family events, Oh, I got this great idea. I think I'm going to do that. nobody cares until it's something. And then they don't care even more. And they only care when it's you're at this peak pinnacle of success. That's why I made the decision.
Ron Nussbaum: To do what you truly want to [00:17:00] do and be happy. I mean, in this process of launching builder comms and doing all of this, I left brick and mortar, we sewed everything and we moved south because we made the decision. We wanted to be down by the ocean and not up in Michigan where we were at. So like we, make decisions based on what we want our life to look like. And then we took action around those and we can't be scared of that.
Paden Squires: Yeah, man. That's such great advice. when you talk about looking for happiness or fulfillment or whatever, it's like, it almost doesn't even matter what you pick.
Paden Squires: You just got to pick something and dive into it. And then. Only when you dive into it, can you start to make adjustments to even figure out what will make you fulfilled and happy?
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah, because it's only, it's just like an ID. Like it's just these thoughts of what we think. And if we're constantly thinking I would rather have this, or I wish it was like this or that it was stuck in that purgatory, torturing yourself.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah, exactly. You're in [00:18:00] misery. And who knows, like, the same thing, when we made the decision to move. And I had to get my wife on board cause she wasn't 100 percent on board to begin with. And you know what? At the end of it, when we were having the conversations and it just came down to her, what's the worst that could happen is like we moved down there and we hate it and we moved back up there.
Ron Nussbaum: And I was like, absolutely. Now you're speaking my language. That is the worst that happens is you go do that. You don't like it. And then you come back. but we absolutely love it. My wife says it's one of the best decisions we've ever made in our entire life. But we were willing to take that action and live in some fear. Cause that's what the main thing, if we want to get to the root, why people don't go do stuff, it's because there's a fear that's involved and you have to live in that fear for a wire until you develop the confidence to [00:19:00] understand, It's just going to be there, but it don't matter. Like I have tons of fears now, but like they don't necessarily matter because they're always going to be there. That self doubt, all of that is always going to be knocking on your door. It's our objective to show up every day and close the door on that and go get shit done.
Ron Nussbaum: And that's how you close the door on that is by doing stuff. Yeah.
Paden Squires: And it's, yeah, it's just facing it, right. You run away from any of those things. You have these dreams and these goals you talk about with your buddies or whatever, but if you'd ever faced that, man, that thing's going to hang over you the rest of your life.
Paden Squires: And it's, yeah, it's a matter of taking action, making a decision. but even before that, it's, you know, a lot of people even took the time to know what they want. Or even, slow down enough to decide this is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I'm going to go for.
Paden Squires: And here's the plan to do it. Almost nobody has that.
Ron Nussbaum: And you know, it's amazing. So I, and I come from [00:20:00] the construction industry, that's the foundation. Like we built, if you think about
Paden Squires: How do you build a house, right? Yeah.
Ron Nussbaum: So think about it. if your life was a house, what you're talking about right there is the foundation.
Ron Nussbaum: You can't just show up and start putting a house up without having that foundation unless you want it to keep falling over. And like you said, nobody does this. And then what happens? If they're constantly in chaos. They're constantly in some kind of disaster.
Paden Squires: And they never build anything.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah. That keeps falling down.
Ron Nussbaum: And then they, what they say all the time is, Oh, I can't. And every time I try to do something, everything just collapses. It's a complete shit show. It's this, it's that well. What did the foundation look like that you set out to do? Cause anybody can just start throwing a bunch, I can go out here and pick up a bunch of sticks and start building something and it's not going to last long.
Ron Nussbaum: It might look cool. [00:21:00] My neighbors might come over and talk to me and be like, Hey, Ron, what are you doing? Oh, I'm building this structure out of these sticks. It's going to be awesome. And the first windstorm that comes through and it'd be over in my neighbor's yard because I had no, I had no plans.
Ron Nussbaum: I had no foundation. I was just throwing something up. And creating a conversation around it, that's, we got to get out of that.
Paden Squires: And that's some really good stuff. That's really good stuff. You've obviously credited being an action taker for a lot of your success. What would you say are some of the mistakes you've made or some of the things you've really learned lessons that you've learned along the way that are, um, some interesting ones.
Paden Squires: Yeah,
Ron Nussbaum: no. Uh, the list is long. Everything from if you're going to be an entrepreneur, getting stuff in writing, taking care of yourself, like we don't live in a handshake society, even though we might try to think it is to take care of yourself and your family first.
Ron Nussbaum: I've been down that road of not protecting that interest how I should have. And, [00:22:00] stay true to who you are. I think most of my failures, most of my mistakes, F up, whatever we want to call them, would be when I deviated from who Ron Nussbaum is, when BuilderComs first went to market, we went to market under a different brand, because I was trying to be like the SaaS company, the software company, like I, it.
Ron Nussbaum: And it was a mess because our markets, the construction industry, our market is who I am. All I had to do was just be true to that. And we, I ended up six months later, I ended up rebranding the company. It costs me a ton of money, a ton of time and missed opportunities that we spent the first 12 months.
Ron Nussbaum: Building a different brand, doing all of this stuff. So like, just stay true to yourself. And what does that look like? Look at your end customer and be okay to just make the decisions.
Ron Nussbaum: like builder comms is. Just what it is. and that's fine because Ron is just what Ron is. I got alignment [00:23:00] with this stuff and the more alignment you can have. The less failures you're going to have, because that's really when we fail, like when you think about it. And I don't, don't necessarily look at stuff as being a failure you only fail if you quit.
Ron Nussbaum: I haven't quit yet. I would just say like, all of this stuff is just opportunities to understand what's wrong. that's what ends up happening. but you're gonna make a tunnel. There's gonna be states you're gonna fail every day You just set it a wire back on social media is like i've failed in the past I would continue to fail and then one day Everybody would just say like i'm some overnight success
Paden Squires: That's the plan.
Paden Squires: And that's what
Ron Nussbaum: It's like that, but that's what it is. It's like, here we are, we're doing this podcast. I live in a world of failure because I'm a high action taker. There's all this shit going on all the time. We're pushing forward with things growing, like we're moving in the right direction, but in order to do [00:24:00] at a high level and push hard, it involves me mentally having to just push through.
Ron Nussbaum: A bunch of shit all the time. And I don't think people think about that. That's not something people think about it. It's why that foundation has to be so strong because storms are going to come through and they're going to take out a quarter of that house and you're going to have to rebuild it.
Ron Nussbaum: It's the same thing as the boat, the ship, like you can never sink the ship, but you're going to have fires on there and you've got to be willing to run around with buckets of water and not buckets of gasoline. That's entrepreneurship. That's being a business owner.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And man, it's the ups and downs with that.
Paden Squires: And entrepreneurship is just going through the ups and downs and being okay with it or not even okay with it. I guess, just keep staying. You don't even have to be okay with it. You just gotta keep walking. Well, you
Ron Nussbaum: just have to understand, like, that's what it is. There are ups and downs, but you just have to look at it as just a straight line.
Ron Nussbaum: there's going [00:25:00] to be dips and valleys. you can't emotionally respond that way. I try to keep as emotionally even keeled as I can, because if you let the really, really high times get you really high and the really, really low times get you really low. It's going to suck a lot, but you can have those highs and lows, but don't let them be so high.
Ron Nussbaum: Don't let them be so low. celebrate some of the wins, but don't like, it's not necessarily a life changing event. You don't let yourself get too high on it because that means it's the father, you gotta come down just to get to base. I don't think people understand, like when you have that baseline and you go super high on a win, there's a down that's going to happen to just get you back to center.
Ron Nussbaum: And if you go way down, you have to dig yourself back up to that [00:26:00] base. So the less you let yourself dip or go up. And you just control your emotions and understand. Yeah. Hey, that was great. That was really, really good. We got to continue doing this and doing that, or Hey, that sucked. I understand that sucked, but here's what we need to do.
Ron Nussbaum: Here's what we learned from it. Don't let the emotions go crazy because if your emotions are crazy, go look through your company. It's going to be the same way.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And it's timely this message because I feel like I went on that roller coaster with it like it's a Friday when we're recording this, but this week was a total, roller coaster like that where, Monday, I'd say Monday afternoon, I was like, man, I got, we got some things rolling here.
Paden Squires: This is awesome. This is great. And then 24 hours later, I was hit with some stuff that just, I'm like, wow, where did this come from? And it's, uh, no joke. The thought that [00:27:00] came to my mind, I was like, I got too excited yesterday.no joke. That was the thought that came
Ron Nussbaum: through my mind. And then when that stuff hits you, the fall is even farther because then you're going. Neutral down into the netting of it. It really seems like a long time. I still struggle with this sometimes, like it's a hard thing to not really get excited or not really get down, but as you learn to control that, it just makes everything a lot easier because it's all going to happen. everything's going to continue to happen. It's hard to predict. If you're growing anything, that's just what it is. Now, if you're running a stable business and you're not chasing growth and you're just putting in operations and you're just, you're learning to be the most efficient, you can start to take that stuff out of it.
Ron Nussbaum: But I'm going to guess most of the listeners out there are not at that stage where [00:28:00] they're saying, Hey, we're just going to make this the most efficient machine we possibly can. Most people are out there trying to grow their businesses right now and continue to grow. And anytime you're doing that, there's going to always be wins and losses.
Ron Nussbaum: Yeah.
Paden Squires: That's great, Ron. Man, it's been a great conversation. Ron, What's the best way people can connect with
Ron Nussbaum: you? Uh, you know, buildercoms.com. com is a great place to connect with me. All of our social media is on there as well as everything about the company and I'm everywhere. You can't, if you search for Ron Nussbaum, you can't miss me.
Paden Squires: Awesome, Ron. I appreciate you, man. Anything else you want to leave, leave for the listeners?
Ron Nussbaum: Just go take some action today, but don't sink the ship.
Paden Squires: Great advice, man. Guys, thanks for tuning in, man. We'll catch you next time.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as [00:29:00] we're trying to accomplish our goal of helping create more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me, @padensquires or going to www.padensquires.com On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.
