Changing The Industry Podcast

Lucas Underwood [00:00:00]:

All right, so, David Jackson, you just don't even know what you've got yourself into. You run this really, like, super duper proper podcast, and now you're on with us, and all of our listeners are like, oh, my God, this poor guy. He doesn't even know what he set himself up for.

David Jackson [00:00:13]:

I love it. I love that as a setup to a conversation. That's perfect.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:18]:

Yeah, absolutely. Tell everybody who you are, man.

David Jackson [00:00:21]:

Yeah. So my name is David Jackson. I'm the president and CEO, the Boone area Chamber of Commerce here in the mountains of northwest North Carolina, a place you know well. Absolutely. In my former life, I used to be a college athletics radio play by play announcer, now turned chamber executive. So I don't know what all that means, but it keeps the lights on the contract.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:44]:

So here I am.

David Jackson [00:00:45]:

Yeah. There you go. There you go.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:47]:

That's very cool. A while back, I had been listening to one of your David, our David and I always talk about the value of associations, and that might be a chamber. In the automotive space, we're calling them associations. At the end of the day, they're chambers. And one of the things that really stood out to me and I shared it in our group. We've got a Facebook group that everybody comes in and joins, and I shared it in the group. But I was listening to one of your recent summits, and it had some economic talks, and I was like, dude, this is powerful. And and you know, this I don't have to feel bad about it. I've not really been involved with our local chamber. Right. I've been a member for, like, five or six years. I've been a member of Blowing Rock for, like, five or six years. I've never been involved because I've been involved with all of these other associations all over the country.

David Jackson [00:01:40]:

Me.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:40]:

But there is some tremendous value to being involved with your local chamber. Now, I'm not seeing a lot of chambers doing what you're doing, though. What's different about the Boone Chamber of Commerce? Because, like, man, I'm telling you, you're putting some killer content down. Y'all are doing a lot of stuff I've never seen chambers do before.

David Jackson [00:01:57]:

Well, remind me to make sure you keep getting the checks that we're sending you to say all these nice things. We'll make sure that happens. Check is in the mail. I explain it like this. I think chambers are like snowflakes. Everyone is designed differently, funded differently. They have different areas of influence or expertise. I just mentioned I had a broadcast background for 15 professional years and lived in a broadcast family. So I've always brought a little bit more of an outward communication promotional slant to this particular organization. Not to say that they weren't doing it right beforehand, but that's just what I do. Right. I think that chambers tend to take on a look and feel of what their staff does well. So we are fortunate here in our chamber to have a professionally developed staff. These are all eight to ten year industry professionals in events, sales, communications, so we've been able to take on a little bit more of an outward push, so to speak, in some of what you're talking about for our area. As you know, western North Carolina, if you were to close your eyes and examine, or say, think about western North Carolina, what does that look like? If you're not from Boone in the northwest part of the state, if you're from Raleigh, Charlotte, wherever, you might immediately start thinking about the drum circle in Asheville or the Grove Park Inn or what have you. Our state has been conditioned to say western North Carolina is Asheville, and everybody else just makes it look pretty. We very intentionally, several years ago, wanted to kind of draw that line in the sand and say, northwest North Carolina has a robust economy. It is completely different from Asheville. We don't have an interstate and airport industry, and that's fine, because what we do have, they don't have. And that's majestic beauty, an ecosystem that has built to hold volume and bring people to this beautiful area. And whether that's ski season, the summer tourism season, app, state football games, whatever it happens to be, we know that we can behave differently and are fundamentally aligned differently than most of the rest of our region. And we need to tout that and celebrate that rather than run from it, for sure.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:16]:

One of the things that I think so many people miss is they sign up with the chamber and they say, well, I'm just a member of the chamber, right? I did it to put the sticker on my door. And until I became involved with all these associations, I didn't realize, a, the benefits that came with being a member of a chamber, being a member of an association. But on top of that, I'm starting to see more and more know, we do these automotive events all over the country, and the biggest one here in the southeast is in Raleigh. It's called ASTE, and it's my favorite show of all the know, lots of huge shows, but it's close to home, it's easy to travel to, et cetera. And so I was placed on the board of directors for that association, or Chamber, whatever you want to call it. And I began to realize that, a if everybody signed up for these programs that the association offered, and they're set up to do this, and A, they help fund the Chamber, and then the Chamber creates opportunity for its members, right? And I think that's such a shame, because we see so many business owners sign up for a local chamber and they never engage the chamber, they never go to any of the events, they never engage with the other people in the association. David Roman, you do the BNI thing, right, which is kind of similar to that. And you were telling me it's had like a huge impact on your business. What's the deal there? What is BNI?

David Roman [00:05:35]:

It's a business networking group. Does it have a lot of similarities to a Chamber of Commerce?

David Jackson [00:05:41]:

We actually have a group like that within our Chamber. It's called the Boone Business Exchange and it's about 30 members that it's leads generating and community building. A lot of referrals that come from that. So very similar in that the is.

David Roman [00:05:58]:

That central to the Chamber experience or is it just kind of ancillary?

David Jackson [00:06:04]:

Yeah, so I think that that kind of goes to where Lucas was going a little bit too, in that I think great chambers find out what their members need and then develop the programming to best associate with that. And I'll use the example of the, you know, the Blowing Rock does a great job better than anybody in our region, in my opinion, of creating events that will bring people to an area. So you think about art in the Park Winter Fest in January. They can get people to come by the thousands to Blowing Rock and stand outside in January when it's like ten degrees outside and they make it a thing, man, you've got to be there. Right. So they have done that well. We don't need to recreate that. What we have seen is that from a business support, business advocacy, people need access to resources, data, programs, camaraderie of knowing that you're going through the same things as maybe the person down the street. And while you might not necessarily be directly competitive, there is benefit to talking and sharing and engaging there. So we have tried to build programs and build a platform that supports that. So with the leads group, for example, that group has been together for about six years. They've done somewhere in the neighborhood of four and a half million dollars of internal referrals amongst about 30 businesses. It's a competitive group to be in a lot of those businesses support one another. Just so happens that ours has a lot to do with relocation, everything from finance to people that will repair refrigerators and sinks and things along those lines. But there is an attendance component to that that makes it you want to be in the room because you're going to get business out of that. And I think that goes back to we know that in our community, word of mouth is one of the most important drivers of vetting. Right. So I'm going to ask Lucas, hey, I know that you do business with this group. I'm about to do business with them. Are they OK? Are they on the up and up? And I will go off of what Lucas says a whole lot more than I'll go off of a website, a Google review or anything else. And we've created a group to kind of help insulate that. So that goes back to chambers. Listen, that's what our job is, first and foremost, and then react and respond to what our members need and what the community needs. And I think all of our chambers in our region do a really good job of working together, but also separately, scratching a number of those.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:37]:

Know, that's what's interesting is because a lot of folks know David's from Kansas City, right? And he's kind of in the outskirts of Kansas City, but it's a bigger city, it's a bigger know, when I try and describe Boner Blowing Rock or Wataga County to a lot of our listeners or to the people in our groups, you almost feel like they don't understand where we're at and that it's different, right? And like, our culture of people is very different than what you see in other places. But then you travel to these places and it's all small town America. At the end of the day, it's all small town America. Now tell me a little bit this event that you guys did, because I'm sitting there and I'm actually on my cell phone on a Sunday afternoon, and I'm watching the economic portion of that. And I thought, this is, like, some of the most valuable information I, as a business owner, could have about what's coming up in the economy where we're at. What does that mean here locally? That was really important information. Where did that brainchild come from? How did you guys start doing that?

David Jackson [00:09:40]:

Yes. So we're fortunate in this community to have a regional economist that works out of Appalachian State. And I say regional. When I say that, I mean Southeast regional. He is kind of the grandfather of the banking industry here in the southeast United States. He helped start a number of smaller community banks that have now been gobbled up by the bank of Americas and the Truists and those types of places. But he is at the forefront of what it means to start a community financial engine. And he happens to be a Boone resident App State professor. He is the dean of the North Carolina School of Banking, which is the industry accreditation kind of standard bearer for bankers in our state. And he just loves to talk and forecast and he's really good at what he does. So he's been on the chamber board for a while and he know, I think he's got a national said, well, you know, if we took somebody with a national following and tried to write a more local predictive story around that, would you be interested? And he's absolutely so we took Harry Davis is his name. Dr Harry Davis is willing to give us an economic forecast every year. And most of the time he's right, COVID we gave him a lot of crap because he absolutely missed Global Pandemic asleep at the wheel, right? But what we've tried to also do is pair that with another presenter on that same day. That speaks to some sort of local interest. In the last event we did, we had Tracy Swartout, who is the superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Blue Ridge Parkway is an amazing economic driver for this area. And if you know what is going on from an infrastructure development standpoint to events and programs, what the Blue Ridge Parkway is doing for the year, you can predict busy times for our associated communities. So that was helpful. Two years ago, we had Christopher Chung, who is a well known person in economic development circles. He's the head of an organization here in North Carolina called EDPNC. It's an economic development partnership of North Carolina. None of these organizations are creatively named, I'll say it like that. But he is at the forefront of large industry. You know, at about the time that we had him speak to our community here again in the mountains of northwest North Carolina, he's talking about Toyota bringing a battery manufacturing plant to North Carolina. Well, that might be positioned in that Guilford Randolph County economic development corridor. But when those high paying jobs are added, those people are going to be looking for a place to vacation. And we are 2 hours down the road and it is very much in our interest what is being developed around the state. We know that Toyota is never going to select Boone to develop batteries. We don't necessarily want that. We know that that is not to your point earlier, Lucas. That's not part of our culture. Right. We can be the support community for a large number of higher paying, higher traffic, need to be around an interstate or rail type of businesses. And we know our spot with that. So we've always tried to take those opportunities to educate our local community about what's going on around us while also giving them predictive information to help understand how their bottom line is going to be met. Because so much of what we do here in a tourism economy is based on how the economy is behaving around us. And if times are good, people travel and they want to come up here. If times are tight, the belts get tightened and we start to see more day trippers than long term visitors. And that obviously has a lot of ramifications on our area.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:13]:

Well, to that effect, right. One of the things that I've found the value of being a member of our chamber, right, is that that information that's available and the camaraderie between all of the different members, I'm seeing communications that help me kind of plan for, hey, I know the shop is going to be busier this week. I understand there's things coming up. I'm watching the calendar of events. I know that I need to be preparing. And believe it or not, I'll watch your schedule and I'll say, okay, I'm going to leave a little bit of open space in our calendar because I know, I'm going to have some out of towners who need to come in for whatever it may be. And I think that in a lot of cases, especially in auto repair, because we're a service, we look at the local chamber and we say, well, what's the benefit to me, right? Like, why is this a benefit to me? What do you wish that they would look at and say, hey, I could use this. This is something that would provide value to me as an auto repair shop. How does that value come to the auto repair shop in a local?

David Jackson [00:14:10]:

Yeah. So that's a great question, and it tees up. Another very important part of chamber work in communities is being attuned to what the needs of your community are. For example, in our area, and you well know, trades development is something that is an ongoing process and always needs to be adjusted. So we host conversations regularly behind the scenes with Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute, Wataga County Schools, more particularly the CTE program at the local high school to make sure that their trades programs lines up and matches well with community need. So right now, a lot of that conversation is focused around construction, trade. As you might imagine, there was this huge boom in real estate and houses were being built and being scheduled to be built some two years off of when transactions went down. Well, that two year window is right now, and we need more carpenters, HVAC electricians than we could ever possibly need. Now in a community that is anchored by a four year institution that is the largest employer and the largest economic driver, it's not always popular to say not everybody needs to go to a four year college.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:25]:

Amen.

David Jackson [00:15:25]:

But we also know that more than ever, you're seeing associations like you're talking about whether that's NC tech paths down in Wilkesboro, training people in more It and computer development, or looking at our community colleges as resources to develop the next group of trades. I just had a conversation with the community college president last week about really starting to see some demand for EV mechanic work in larger scale. Like for Apple cart, for example. Our regional transit operation is about to have three EV buses. They've got mechanics that have been trained on one, but now it's like, all right, how are they going to scale training all of their staff to service a growing fleet? And the town of Boon has just invested in EVs. There are not an abundance of people that are overly skilled right now in all of the different products that are out there. So we are constantly looking at whether it's auto repair, whether it's home building. What is the next need. AI is a huge buzz topic right now, but what does that look like for Northwest North Carolina? What are some practical applications that aren't going to take away jobs but are going to create opportunity. We just happen to have in this community a company that makes point of sale cash registers and sales devices for grocery stores. Grocery stores.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:53]:

I work on some of their cars and it's like the biggest one, right? By far the biggest software supplier.

David Jackson [00:16:58]:

Yeah. They are well positioned to help us as a community respond to those needs. What is the next advent of point of sale software? Distribution. And certainly they're going to be plugged into that. But we know that we're going to be able to bring other partners along, whether that's supply chain or whether that's just people that want to play in that same kind of line of work that can be benefited by the expertise that a member will bring. And somebody needs to communicate all of that. So whether that's the Chamber economic development organization, there are people that are well positioned to do that kind of work in every community.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:35]:

So you tugged on a heartstring here. And so we're going to have to talk about it. We're talking about skilled trades, right? We have a group of well, we've got one group with over 12,000 people in it. We've got one group with 8000, right. Tons of people. And the conversation always comes back to the skilled trades. And we obviously know we've got a shortage. I don't know that you could call it a shortage in a lot of ways. Many of these tradespeople feel like they have probably not been treated appropriately moving forward. We're trying to fix that and we're trying to do the things that need to happen. We've got technicians here that will earn $70 to $100,000 a year in this shop. Right. You talk about EV, we're sending them all over the country to train them and get them skilled to where they can work on these vehicles because there are major, major safety concerns. They have to know what they're doing when we get into EV, right. You bring up though, construction because one of the things that I think happens when we get into these small circles and we're just automotive is we don't realize that everybody else is dealing with the same thing we are. Right. The other trades are facing shortages too. There's shortages in construction, there's shortages in plumbing, there's shortages in electricians. Right. And they can't find people to do their job. I guess it was four years ago we started the North Carolina Apprenticeship Program for automotive right. In this shop. I don't know if you know this, the first journey woman for the North Carolina Automotive Apprenticeship Program worked in this shop and went through this program right here in this shop. And so it pays for a free two year associate's degree. It has all types of waivers and it gives them tuition credits, and it does all of these other things that help them get through school and creates opportunity. But if we don't know about those things and we're not working together to say, there's this opportunity out here. We can't ever put them through that program. And I tell people all the time, and they always laugh at me. I'm like, Dude, we're blessed in Wataga County. We have one of the coolest high schools ever, right? Like, they invested in the trade programs like no other high school I've ever seen. I've been in high schools all over the state, all over the country. I've been in community colleges all over the state and all over the country. We are blessed in a way that very few are. But are we taking advantage of that opportunity here? Are we doing what we're supposed to do? And if we're not connecting, how do we even know that opportunity is there?

David Jackson [00:19:50]:

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think to hit on the school aspect of that for a second, my daughter's a student there now. That's why schools cost money. People always will wring their hands and say, I can't believe this building costs this much. Well, when you see that particular building was built with a purpose to have community college courses integrated into that building so those students aren't leaving campus, and the community college is actually sending some students to that campus at night. I mean, that's why things cost money. We want those things to produce, in a way. And I think going back to the initial part of this, it is helpful to know that other people are in your shoes. And I would encourage those of you that are able to speak knowledgeably about how some of those associations and the benefit of the association came together. So in your case, there being able to get apprenticeships. Well, apprenticeships are becoming incredibly popular, not only here in North Carolina, but all throughout the country because they offer that educational opportunity with a little bit of money. Nobody's doing anything for free right now. Internships, like we all knew, don't exist, right? You're not going to do that. But what you are going to do is try to knock off education in a cost effective way. And in a number of our skilled trades, it's actually more efficient to be trained by the people that are doing the work every day rather than going and getting textbook theory on how to pound a nail into a piece of wood or how to fix a carburetor. You're in there with the people that can teach you in far less time and get you skilled to help them do the job in a much quicker fashion for whatever reason. From a societal standpoint, we traditionally, over decades looked down on that, and I think that now you're starting to see people go, wait a second, that's really smart. It's saving students money. It's allowing your technician that's making $70,000 a year not to be saddled with so much student debt that they're not able to buy a house if they could find one to buy in this county, that's a different topic altogether. But the idea there is that they're making a wage. They can make a life in a community, and that's what we all want to see. There is this other kind of undercurrent here, and I'm sure that you can attest to this. The appalachia culture that this region sees as its operational norm has also looked at training sometimes as, not for me. You don't need to go to that school over here. We teach you everything you need to know right here. Again, that has gone counter to this whole four year educational philosophy over the years. But now I think you're starting to see that message and come back around to, hey, we can buy into what you're saying. Yeah, we can teach you everything you need to know right here. Right here might be the automotive shop today. It might be the family farm tomorrow. But there is value in learning from people that are doing, and you can tie that into an industry credential that will travel with you. So if you do get pulled to go down and work in Raleigh or Wilkesboro, the time that you spent at LNN is going to pay off down the know, and you're going to be well skilled, on top of the line technology. You're going to know what you're doing. We have to move, in a way, I think, as a community, and I say that globally speaking, that we are getting people educated efficiently and effectively because the needs are now. We don't have the luxury of waiting for somebody six years to go through a program. We also need skilled labor now.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:28]:

Right? Let me ask you this. Do you know the numbers of what it is, especially in the housing and the construction? Do you have a good feel of the pulse of that? I mean, are we experiencing because in the automotive field, right, for years now, we've been saying, hey, we've got a technician shortage. I can't find any help. But every restaurant I go into in Boone, every construction guy that comes in here and gets his truck worked on, they're all saying, I can't find help, man. I can't get help anywhere. Is that a consistent theme across the board?

David Jackson [00:23:55]:

Yeah, it's consistent in anything that I'll say is manual labor. And there are some reasons for that. I think one thing that the Pandemic did was made people think about how they value their employees. And I know that there are national narratives. Right. I've heard until I'm blue in the face about how nobody wants to work right now. It's like, are they saying that or do they just not want to work for you? Because maybe you're paying a low wage, you're not offering benefits. You're not offering some of the things that are competitive in your market. So I think, again, going back to what a chamber can help you with or your trade organizations can really help you with is understanding what the market standards are. We know that not every job, it's blessed to be flexible. Right. You can't work on somebody's car at your house. That's not a job that that translates to. But we also know that there are other things that are outside of pay that people are prioritizing right now. It could be something as simple as a four day work week where you go, well, on the surface that doesn't sound right. But if you've got somebody that says, I'm willing to work for you from seven in the morning until seven at night, four days a week, but I want my Friday off and I'm going to get the same volume of work done in that Monday through Thursday window. Do you care? Can you get past the point of saying, well, that's not the way we do it here? Exactly. Well, actually, we could do it that way here. So I think what the Pandemic did was it's forced people to go under the hood, no pun intended, and ask, what is it that makes us a valuable place to work and how can we sell that? The competition for people. I know that the hourly rates are up and quite honestly, they need to be. We have been underpaying people that are doing really important work for a long, long time. But it's not just the wages, it's work conditions. It's being a supportive supervisor. It's knowing that some days in our community, especially if you've got two kids, there's a chance that they're going to two different schools on two different sides of the county and getting them to their places. And you to your place on a morning where it's snowing sideways and five degrees outside is a little bit of a challenge. So are you the kind of employer that's going to say, hey, you know what, this morning we know that some things are going on. Maybe we're on a two hour delay, hey, we're coming in at 930 and the expectation is you're going to work till six. There's a manufacturer here in the community, they deal with outdoor manufacturing. They do a lot of gear, support gear for hikers. And then they got into linemen bags and things like that. Well, this company is built off of the strength of a bunch of gearheads, right? These folks want to be outside, out in the elements, hiking on a trail, hiking up a rock face. So they built this whole entire company structure around that. And they said, you know what, when it's sunny and 70 in the summertime, we want you out on a rock somewhere. And you know what? Take our bags and take our toys that we're making, make sure they work. But now if it's raining tomorrow, we're in here from 07:00 A.m. To 07:00 P.m.. We're going to grind. So you can leave at 02:00 in the afternoon when it's sunny again and they do not have a. Problem with staff retention, sometimes that speaks.

Lucas Underwood [00:27:04]:

Volumes because it's the same thing with my shop, right? Like, when we started looking at the ways we could do things better. The new shop is air conditioned. It's bright inside, right? Like, when I open the doors and it's daylight, people are like, oh, my God, it got brighter when you opened your doors. We set it up for that reason, and we provided benefits and we did things. And I talked to other shop owners, and they're like, but I've never done it that way. I'm not sure that that's the right thing. Well, just because you haven't done it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, right? Like the way we had been doing it. And in some ways, I feel like and I go back to that economic presentation that we listened to, in some ways, it feels like our economy left the blue collar worker behind. And you were talking about the education of these guys, especially in our culture, because a lot of these older guys, they kept a lot of that knowledge to themselves. We didn't have a glorified apprentice program that would pass that knowledge on down. We didn't train them because you can't just all of a sudden be a mentor, right? You have to know how to teach somebody, and that's a hard job. And so we never created a process for that, and so we never moved that education down the line. And we didn't give the knowledge that that ten year, 20 year, 30 year master carpenter had to the next generation because there was no system for it, right? In some ways, he thought, well, you're jeopardizing my potential for a job. You're taking my potential. I don't want to teach you that because I'm training my replacement. And so I think we have to change the way that we look as a whole at skilled trades because something has to give. Our economy will collapse if we don't have skilled trade workers, right? There's no way it can continue. But on top of that, seeing that these guys are coming together now to teach and to train and to lift up the next generation and guide them and give them direction. But us as employers, we have a responsibility to build that opportunity for them, because it's not going to happen on its own. You don't take little Timmy and put him in the bay with the guy that's been working on cars for 30 years and say, teach him how to do it. That's not how it works, right? There's got to be structure. There's got to be curriculum. And you talk about pay. The North Carolina apprenticeship program for the automotive deal, it starts them at 1650 an hour, right? So you're in high school at 1650 an hour, and then in a year, it goes up a dollar, and then another year it goes up another dollar, and it takes them up. And when they're done, with the apprenticeship program. They've got tools. They've got a two year associate's degree, and they're making $20 an hour. Where do you get a job making $20 an hour? Right out of high school.

David Jackson [00:29:42]:

That's right. Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:29:46]:

I wish I had had a job like that.

David Jackson [00:29:48]:

And I think that there's an important component to add to that, too, and it's a career path job. You could go and I've heard a lot of people say, well, I'm not going to take this job. I go flip burgers at Wendy's for that. No disrespect to Wendy's, but what is the career longevity in that? Unless you're going to go into restaurant management, is that what you're going to do for a while? I think what has become more prevalent through apprenticeship programs, there's a program here in the construction trades in North Carolina called Trade Up that was modeled out of the Hickory area, but has been implemented in Watalga and Avery here lately. And that is kind of exactly what you're talking about. Timmy gets to go with the construction crew and learn from people that have done it, and there's some graduated ways that that position is paid and ultimately leads into a part time job. What I think that you're seeing, though, is that people are willing to get creative with the experience that's being there, but then they're also beginning to talk differently about, I'll call it the projected career paths that are associated there. So it's not like, Timmy, you're going to go hang out with the construction crew for the summer. It's, Timmy, you're going to learn what it means to run a construction business, and you're going to see how VPC builders attacks a job and they plan for it and they staff for it. You're going to see all these things, and hopefully one day you're going to take all of that knowledge and a little bit of work with us, and you're going to start your own company. And it's a company being willing to say, use us as the model. We're confident and comfortable enough in our own skin that we're going to get the job, but we know that we need a whole lot more of us so we can have a whole lot more jobs. And it's those people that are willing to kind of let people behind the curtain and show. I think that I always felt that when I learned, I learned more from doing rather than from reading. Maybe that's not exactly the greatest ode to my professors, but in reality, I learned more sitting in an office, answering a phone, and reacting to the situations that I would one day become professionally associated with because I watched a mentor do it. And not all mentors lead the same. You're right. There are some that will never say a word, but their actions speak volumes. I think the more we think outside of what traditionally is the way that maybe we were led along the way in our youth and think about what today's kids need. I think we can knock down some barriers and actually see that skilled trades are truly skilled. And if you don't believe it, think about what you spend money for somebody else to do and how well they do it and how much you would screw it up if you tried yourself.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:23]:

Exactly how much it would end up costing you in the end. Hey, listen, we fix a lot of those. A lot of know coming back to that is Eric Mortensen, right. From the local high school. And Stark. Amazing. Amazing team. I have seen amazing things. And then Dustin came on board and Dustin's done amazing. You know, it was so neat to watch that grow into what it grew into. Right. And Larry was a fantastic automotive teacher, but at the time he didn't have the support of a CTE director like Mrs. Stark. Right. And I know, I guess she's the principal now or assistant principal or whatever.

David Jackson [00:33:04]:

She actually just got moved into a central office job and she's going to be superintendent of the state one day, I think, right.

Lucas Underwood [00:33:10]:

I guarantee. Know she I remember hearing conversations where she would come in and say, eric, look, all I care about is that these students learn and I want them to enjoy it. I want this to be a good experience for them. And you know what that looks like because you were in the field. I don't necessarily know what that looks like. Whatever you need, just let me know and we'll make it happen. And so I remember watching Eric take that program and say, I don't just want to teach them how to work on a car. I don't want them to sit in a classroom for a full day and just sit there and look at a textbook or listen to me blather on. I want to put them in the shop and let them get the passion for what it is that I have the passion for. I want to pass my passion along to them. And so I watched him take these students and he wasn't just teaching them how to work on cars, right. He was teaching them, he was running it like a business. And they were bringing teacher cars in and he would explain, here's how you talk to them and here's what I want you to explain. It's important. You can't have a misunderstanding about this, right. You're a business person. You have to understand what this looks like. And so I saw a lot of these students leave that program and say, I never wanted to own a business before, but I think I can do this. And I've learned enough here that I think I know what I need to know. Right. Not that I know how to run a business, but I know that I don't know what I need to know to do it right. Yeah, it was so powerful to watch that, and I watched that the first year Eric was there, there was hardly anybody in that classroom. I want to say there was, like, ten students in that classroom. Year two, he said, I think we're going to have to hire another teacher. Year three, he says, I've got a waitlist, like, literally a long, long waitlist to get people into this program. And that's amazing to me. And it's amazing that it's just the passion that somebody brings to that program that creates it and engages them not to come back to the chamber thing. But I think that having those connections, right? So when I first started trying to get connected with high school, there was no connection for me. I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know who to go to to talk to about an apprenticeship program. I didn't know what the resources were. And if you go and you try and decipher that by yourself, it's really difficult to pinpoint that and know what to do and know where to go. Now, it all worked out that I got associated with the Asta here in North Carolina, and then I got connected with the person who creates the curriculum and handles all of the skilled trades for North Carolina. And then through that, I got connected with the high school, and it was just like this perfect storm of things coming together in this perfect way to make it work. But think about how valuable that is when you come to me and you say, I don't have any technicians or I don't have any skilled trades workers, where's the best place to start? Well, you've got to be involved in your community. You have to understand what's going on in your community. And I think for far too long, I've shared this before. When I started in this business, I had no clue how to run a business. I was completely clueless, right? And I started the shop, and we were just doing work, right? And so when I went to this first trade show that I went to, I had said, I'm done. I'm not doing this anymore. And I went to my wife and she said, well, what are you going to do? And I said, I want to train to be the best technician that I can be. And she said, well, that's really funny. This postcard came in the mail today. And I went to this trade show to learn to be the best technician I could be. But I walked through the doors of this trade show and I realize, dude, I am clueless. All of these other people are talking about all these ways to run a business and all of these strategies and all of this information. I've just been doing the work that the business does. I've not been running a business, I've not been working on the business. I've been working in the business. And I can't see what the business even is. And I look back at that today and I think I was doing $400,000 a year, and now we're going to do a million and a half, $2 million. This shop has the potential to do 3 million a year, right. And I look back and I say, well, if I had not gotten that information, I would not be here right now. And all it took was just a little bit of information. It wasn't a right. It was just the awareness that I was an idiot, right. As bad as that sounds, David got the same awareness, but I don't know that anything's changed yet.

David Roman [00:37:32]:

Nothing's changed. You know, they say that's why we haven't gone back to the Moon, right? Why all the people that learned how to get to the Moon with less computing power than you have in your cell phone died. They didn't pass along all the information. They shut all the programs down. So all those scientists that had figured out a way to get to the Moon didn't pass along the information. And so they're having to start from scratch, like we have to start from ground zero to figure out how to get to the Moon and maybe Mars.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:04]:

Yeah, that's a little bit of a depressing concept.

David Jackson [00:38:06]:

There you go.

David Roman [00:38:07]:

Well, I mean, that's what's going to happen if we don't pass along the information, right? I agree with you with trades.

David Jackson [00:38:14]:

Yeah. You see some particular elements and I'll call them more service related industries that yeah, you've got aging infrastructure and that infrastructure is human capital and the lack of a willingness by some to share that information because of whatever proprietary craziness that they've got going on. We all got a little bit of that. So I speak from experience, but I think that there is value, whether it's a chamber, whether it's an association like you're talking about Lucas, having the right people around to help you inform what that strategy looks like. So, for example, if you're trying to build another automotive trade organization, what representation do you have at the organizational or management level of that association that's going to help people be able to paint the full and accurate picture of what it is you're trying to achieve as a group? We have a board of directors at the chamber that in this community. Again, you can get lost in the influence of the top five employers or top ten employers, but we know that 85% of the businesses in this community are represented by folks that have five or less employees. So we need that represented in our board probably more than the top employers do. So we understand what those needs are and those dynamics are. I would go back and say, too, that from that you're going to get so much informed consult that you could then pair with experiences from other areas. I do think that one thing that the Pandemic brought us was this understanding that we can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime. So whether you're in Kansas City, whether you're in Boone, North Carolina, whether you're in Los Angeles, at the core of it all, our business communities are very much the same. Your shop in Kansas City and your shop in Boone are going to attract a target audience for those two areas, and that is where you are very similar. How you function as a business might look completely different in some respects because one area is urban and one area is rural, but at the end of the day, it's satisfying customers and it's providing a need. And you can learn so much from people that are in similar circumstances or maybe not in what appears at the surface as a similar circumstance, but a willingness to say, hey, yeah, we're seeing a lot of Teslas come in here, too. And here's some things that we've learned about how Quirky Tesla people are and the things that you've got to say to them to make them feel comfortable about doing their work with you. I mean, that could be sometimes the thing that unlocks it. And I think that now we're a little bit more willing to hear it from others. How do you then take that and apply the knowledge that you're gaining from outside and put it into your own business? You got to be willing to do that. I go back to a staff retention element to that too. And I think that staffs that feel like they're being educated, that their company prioritizes educational development, whether that's sending them to trade shows, whether that's bringing in people to teach the next new thing, they feel like they're getting an investment in their career. And no matter how you're doing that, whether it's a zoom call with some friends and you're bringing back some information or saying, go down to Raleigh, go to this trade show, come back and teach us something, those employees feel valued and they will do valuable work because they feel their employer is investing in.

Lucas Underwood [00:41:37]:

So along those lines, if we're going to ask the David Jackson solution to the skilled trades problem, let's hear it. What is it that you think when you're looking from the outside in, right? Because you deal with a lot of skilled tradespeople. You deal with a lot of businesses that use skilled tradespeople. What is it that you can see that's like the AHA moment, you know, that we've missed it? Can you see anything that you just like, dude, this is so obvious?

David Jackson [00:42:04]:

Well, that's a great question, and I think I'll answer it two different ways. In one way, I like the progress that we're making in celebrating career achievement in the trades. And I think that goes back to the root high school level, right. You've seen and we're getting ready to start here soon, a trade signing day. We see college athletes signing on the dotted line in front of the backdrop with their parents and the coach and all that kind of stuff. Why aren't we doing that for people that are graduating from automotive tech programs or construction trade programs? Because the impact of a career pathway is just the same, right? And I think, again, in a culture that traditionally has been a little bit muted in terms of what we celebrate, we need to recognize that these 17 year old, 18 year old kids that have made a commitment to try to do a thing need to be rewarded for that commitment, right. And need to be shown that they are the next stars of that industry. And I think the more we communicate that, there is a normalization of not necessarily going down the four year road all the time. My mother graduated from a technical college down in the Greensboro area, Guilford Tech. She was a nurse, went down that road because it was easier on her schedule. And it was interesting to see how they celebrated their nurse graduation differently than what the college down the street did. They treated everybody just the same. Well, on the technical college campus, it was like, we are answering the need. They're saying all the right things to make you feel really good about your educational attainment. We need to remember that. I think we're changing a language and we're saying, you know, however you're getting skilled, you're going to get trained by industry professionals, you're going to go into the field immediately. You're not going to have a lot of debt. You're going to get opportunity for high paying jobs, celebrate it, don't run from it. And understand that not everybody is destined to go down the same path. And we are all working toward educational attainment in all paths, and we've got to be willing to own that as a community in saying that, hey, you know what? We might have a four year institution that's got all kinds of great accolades, but you know what? We've got one hell of a trades program up at the community college and in the high school that is putting people into the next generation of what's going to move our community forward from an economic development perspective. And we're ready for it. We educate people here, and we're going to educate people no matter where they happen to be going after the degree comes across the desk, so to speak.

Lucas Underwood [00:44:43]:

Absolutely. And look, here's the thing. I think that for so long we had an issue where parents and where even other teachers, right? We talk all the time about guidance counselors in the high schools, right. They didn't understand, for instance, automotive. They thought, well, you're a grease monkey, right? You're not going to get paid. Well, you're going to be the guy down here at a little lube joint and you're going to be nasty and filthy and dirty, and you're not going to make any money to some degree for a long time. That's how we treated our people, right?

David Roman [00:45:14]:

And they weren't true for a long time. But all of that still applies. You just make slightly more money. I think the big difference now, though, is that they recognize that an AI bot is not going to be fixing your car anytime soon. When that wheel falls off, somebody has to physically pick it up and put it back on the car. And so all those jobs, who's going to fix the pipe? Who's going to wire the building? All of a sudden, those jobs are going to become wildly more popular and more valuable because, yeah, I mean, what's the screenwriters fighting right now? The big streaming companies are looking to replace them with AI. They're hiring AI experts right now to then cut out all these screenwriting jobs because, hey, nobody's watching this stuff anyway. We just need to put out content that very few people are going to watch. I think we can just use AI to do it and they don't have to pay all these people all this money. So those jobs that aren't going to be easily replaceable with a computer is now going to become in demand. And the mindset, like you're saying, David, the mindset has to shift and the supply has to be there. Right. The opportunities for mentorship, education, and then the way we treat the educational opportunities needs to change as well. I think you're right on that as well.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:42]:

And look, as the pain point increases, right, all of a sudden we're going to be changing our whole dynamic about what it is that we're talking about being important. Right. We've already seen it, right. The guidance counselors, the ones in the high school were saying, oh my God, I thought you could just this is where we were sending the kids that maybe they were struggling in other areas, but this is way more complex. Right? We're talking about coding and reprogramming chips on the board and we're talking about.

David Roman [00:47:10]:

Do you think that's what happened? That we can't find technicians that are willing to read service information? It's because they stuck all the kids that refuse to read into the it.

David Jackson [00:47:20]:

Makes you wonder, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:47:21]:

I can't read the tape measure, so they put me in construction. You know, at the end of the day, let's think about this when the pain point gets to a certain threshold. And I think we saw that in our community, David. I really do. I think we saw that in our community. I think in some ways, especially in the state of north Carolina, we've always been about education, but I think in some ways, there was a little bit of a pain point that was starting to hit, and everybody was, hey, guys, I understand you want a house, but I don't have a way to build a house for you. Right. I just talked to a shop in Raleigh just the other day, closing up their doors lined up out the door with work, but they can't find any help, right? So now all of a sudden, you can't get your car fixed, you can't find somebody to come wire up your house, you got a leak, and there's no plumbers because everybody's booked out three weeks. Your AC went out. It's 90 degrees in your house, and there's nobody that will come fix it. And the guy that will come fix it is quadruple the rate that you thought you were going to pay for it.

David Roman [00:48:19]:

You want to find something weird? I'm sitting in the BNI meeting this morning, and they're trying to pass each other business around. Some problem. I don't know anything about houses. There's a problem with the siding and flashing that was incorrectly installed or not installed or something, right? And they're looking at each other going, I don't have a guy for that. And then they look at the other person. They're like, I don't have a guy for that either. They didn't have anybody that was doing this very specific thing on this house that would make the house uninsurable. They can't proceed with repairs. The guy who was trying to pass the referral was the home inspector. Now he's trying to help them close a mortgage, right? And so it's going to hold up hundreds of thousands of dollars in money that is not going to be transferred from the bank to the previous owner. And all of that is going to stop because they can't find a guy to fix this flashing and siding thing, because nobody in Kansas City, at least in our little network, is there to do it. That's got to be sobering at some point. You got to go, what the crap is going on here? Somebody's got to be able to do this work.

David Jackson [00:49:30]:

Well, I do think, Lucas, you pointed out that there's a shift in the guidance counselor language, right? Well, I think there's also this shift in understanding that it's not just about the technical skill. It's projecting it farther than that and saying this is a business opportunity to the flashing guy could have flashing.com out in Kansas City right now. It sounds like he at least have.

Lucas Underwood [00:49:57]:

1 million in a day.

David Jackson [00:49:58]:

Yeah, but it's like, how do you try at that level when kids are still trying to figure out what it is you want to do that you're projecting? This is not just you fixing cars. This is you having an opportunity to build a business that will support you and your family for the rest of your life and employ others that you can support them because there is demand, and it's teaching people. I think that's where our education partners must be in alignment with community leaders to make sure that the skills that are needed are being accurately projected, both in the short term and in the long term. It would have been nice to think that five years ago we could have said, oh yeah, well, we're going to have this huge global disruption and it's going to cause everybody to stay at home. Therefore, they're going to want every little odd job project done inside their house because they're staring at it all day and they can't get away from it. So we need to get a short run of staff into this kind of handyman role where they're not doing huge deals, it's coming in and fixing all the little nagging stuff. And we know well in this community, those people are making a killing right now, and they have so much work, they can't possibly get to it all. But that's the unfortunate nature of a shift that nobody saw coming. But what if we did start thinking about what's coming and the ramifications of where we are in the housing market now versus one day when rates come back down again, there's going to be another construction boon. Are we educating the 10th, 11th, and twelveTH grade student to think about how they harness that? Because the wages are going to be great, the opportunity is going to be abundant, and if they have a little entrepreneurial salt sprinkled into this skill that they may have developed through great mentors and teachers and whatnot, now they're the ones that are sitting at the BNI Group going, send me that lead. I got it. I got no problem. And if I can't do it, my buddy over here that I went to high school with, he's got it. We got it taken care of here's.

Lucas Underwood [00:51:58]:

The thing is on the other side of all of this, though, is there is a parent who and look, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? We know that. And I know that when my child falls over and hurts himself because he was doing something stupid, what do I want to do? I want to run over there and pick him up. No, are you okay? But I also know that that's not what's best for him, right? At the end of the day, I know that he has to learn if you make a mistake, there's a consequence for those mistakes. Everything we do has an equal or greater reaction, right? So the reality at the end of the day is I think we've had a lot of parents saying, well, I don't want them to go into the skilled trades. I don't want them to be out here working on cars or building houses. I want them to get a four year degree. I want them to be better than I was. I want them to have more opportunity. And I don't think that we've had the messaging to the parents that says, this is the opportunity. You're thinking the four year degree. I'm telling you, I have had more people come through this shop that went to App and come in here and say, I've got a four year degree that cost me $250,000 and. You know what I'm doing? I'm working in a restaurant, right?

David Roman [00:53:06]:

$250,000.

Lucas Underwood [00:53:08]:

I'm throwing out random numbers, man. You know me better than that.

David Roman [00:53:13]:

The problem is their jobs are going to get replaced by AI. I don't understand why we're having a dilemma here on what the parent messaging needs to be. It's like, hey, make your kids future AI proof.

Lucas Underwood [00:53:27]:

There you go.

David Jackson [00:53:27]:

Well, I think how to say this without throwing my own parents under the bus or anybody else's, they're creatures of your time. I see my kids right now and kind of what you were talking about. It's like you've got a generation now that has been digitized in a way that we weren't I remember when having a speaking spell was a pretty damn big know, and Oregon Trail was on this green screen, and you just hope not to get Dysentery. And now we've got kids that are growing up in this iPad, iPhone generation of screens all the time, which, yeah, that's got its own issues, but it also means that there is a more technically skilled kid at the end of that. Like you were just talking about content generation. Well, it used to be that you needed huge crews to go out and do things that now somebody can do on their iPhone. I think that the more that we pair technology for good and not just AI to replace people, but taking a kid that's already technically adapt and creating some soft skill development in there, but also saying, hey, you know what? You might like to work on cars in the driveway. And did you know that that's a career path? Why are we not saying that? Find what you're passionate about and say, hey, you know what? You have always done all of these things to the family truckster, and that's a really lucrative career. Rather than going down the four year road and keeping up with the other family's flags in the yards in the neighborhood that we said, this is the best thing for my child. I just had a conversation with my daughter the other day about kind of her career path. She's going into 10th grade or 11th grade. We're starting to have some of those conversations. She's like, I'd like to work in a medical something, but I want to be in a lab. I don't want to deal with patients. I don't want to deal with people. I want to be in a lab. I'm like, if you're talking about lab tech, we need to have a conversation station about what you think you might need to do, because there's a really expensive way to do that, and there's a really efficient way to do that. And those two things are on two opposite ends of the education spectrum. What is it that you really want? And I want to be in a lab doing this stuff. I'm like, all right, well, let's start talking about this. Our parents didn't do that right. So it takes us stepping outside of what our comfort level was as end users and going, there's a better way to do it. And that takes some of that. Well, this is the way I came up. It's different. You know, I collected baseball.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:02]:

They are different.

David Jackson [00:56:02]:

Now. That's digital. What are we talking about?

David Roman [00:56:06]:

That's making a comeback? Don't worry about it.

David Jackson [00:56:08]:

That's right.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:10]:

David's got a collection of them. He's just waiting for the return on investment right now.

David Jackson [00:56:14]:

Let me know when that comes.

David Roman [00:56:16]:

And I'll 1987, 88, 89, and 91. Full top sets. I still have settlement in the closet somewhere. Yeah. Complete the whole thing. Yeah.

David Jackson [00:56:26]:

I used to like when the traded series came out. Then it's like, all right, let me see. I've got the rare error card.

David Roman [00:56:33]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:34]:

Those were the days, man. I think we all just dated, right?

David Roman [00:56:39]:

We dated ourselves. You were a pup.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:42]:

Yeah. You got me beat. The Davids have me beat.

David Jackson [00:56:45]:

Yeah. His Oregon trail.

David Roman [00:56:47]:

I played Oregon trail in school. You probably didn't have Oregon Trail. I was too old by the time.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:53]:

You no, I had Oregon trail. I had Oregon Trail. I did. It was a good game.

David Jackson [00:56:57]:

But he had a cheat.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:58]:

Still downloaded today. There we go.

David Roman [00:57:01]:

He had the HD version, polygon graphics.

David Jackson [00:57:05]:

I don't want to know what a world looks like with an HD oregon Trail.

David Roman [00:57:10]:

Hey, it's out. It's absolutely out. Pull it up on steam. It's there.

David Jackson [00:57:14]:

Do the people actually bleed with the injuries now, or it's not just a text box that pops up? You actually see cholera?

Lucas Underwood [00:57:25]:

I didn't need to.

David Roman [00:57:28]:

That'd be awful. Would be awful.

David Jackson [00:57:31]:

Well, good.

David Roman [00:57:32]:

This was awesome, dude.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:34]:

Yeah. Thank you very much.

David Jackson [00:57:36]:

Yeah. Thank you all very much.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:37]:

Of course. And.