Blue-Collar, High-Voltage, and High-Stakes: Rebuilding the Workforce Pipeline with Skilled Trades Mentorship at TradeMentor

This is Straight Straight Out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton. Good day, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Straight Out of Crumpton. I'm Greg Crumpton, your host of the show. Hopefully, your brain teaser for the next thirty five, forty minutes. We'll see how that goes. Folks, today, as I tend to do, I brought you somebody who has big old ugly hands and has used them over the course of his career to build a life, build a career, build a family. I'm just really excited to have a gentleman on who has done it the right way. Croud to bring you Doug Winston today. Doug, welcome to the show my friend. Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me on. So folks, Doug runs a really cool new program, relatively new, treementor dot org. I'm looking forward to learning some more about that. And I have been fortunate enough to get to participate a little bit in the early going so that's going to be fun. Dutch career is in electrical and he runs and owns a company called D and M Electric Incorporated in the beautiful upstate of New York in my memory is accurate today. Well, it depends what part of New York you're from. I'm only thirty minutes from New York City, so we're pretty much downstate. But if you live in New York City, this is upstate to you. So anything over the bridge is good north, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Doug, thank you for taking time today. Really enjoyed getting to know you a bit. We met a little over a year ago up in New Hampshire. Yep. When we were up there together for an event, then followed along with you since that time and enjoying. And I do love your humor, which nobody seems to get on LinkedIn but me, which I really do enjoy. Some of your comments are like, man, he beat me to the punch, but fun stuff, man. Tell us a little bit about you, Doug, how you got here, you know, a little bit about DNN, why and how, and then trade mentor. Curious how you launched that mentally and and and in real life as well. Okay. So I probably if this this we're gonna start back in high school because, you know, I was expected to go to college, and my mother said oh you're smart and you're gonna be the first person in our family to go to college and it was all planned out for me except what I was gonna do and what I really wanted to do. So I was pretty indifferent to the whole idea and I was we didn't have a lot of money so I was gonna be going to Westchester Community College to take electrical engineering technology because that was pretty much the easiest thing I could get away with, convincing my mother was a real course. So before I could graduate I had to go and see the guidance counselor, and I went to Catholic school so this was a nun. And I picked up my file and said, mister Winston what do we have here? And she opens folder and she goes, Electrical Engineering Technology at Westchester Community College. What kind of a bullshit course is that? And I said, excuse me sister? And she goes, come on why aren't you taking engineering? What gives? I said, well I don't want to be an engineer. I'm really not interested in being an engineer. It's just I hate math and just the thought of sitting behind a desk the rest of my life. Just no, I just don't want to do that. And she worked on me. You could be a field engineer. You could do this. You could do that. And I'm like, I hate math. I don't wanna be an engineer. So finally, looked at me. She goes, alright. Let's try this another way. What do you like to do? I'm like, well, what do you mean? She goes, when you leave here today, where are you going? I said, well, I'm going to my friend John's house, and I'm I'm actually gonna be putting a stereo in his nineteen sixty eight cougar he's building. They're building and restoring a car, and I'm actually gonna try to fix the taillights. And, you know, she likes to do electrical stuff. I said, yeah. I like to do electrical stuff. That's why I'm going for electrical engineering technology. Yeah, yeah, forget about that. She goes, why don't you want to be an electrician? And I'm like, oh, don't want a blue collar job. Because she just told me I don't want to sit behind a desk. And I'm like, I don't I don't I'm not even sure I know what an electrician does. So she looks at me, goes, do you have any relatives that are electricians? I said, well, yeah. My cousin's an electrician. In fact, owns his own business. He just, you know, started a couple years ago. She goes, good. You're gonna go home. You're gonna call him, and you're gonna ask him if you could work for him this summer. And I'm like, yes, sister. So I go home. Yes, ma'am. Go home, tell my mother. And she goes, oh, she thinks that'll help you in college. And I go, yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. There you go. Fast forward a couple of weeks. Go meet my cousin Al at his house. Don't meet me at my old house. Meet me at my new house. Yeah. How's she built in Tucker? No. My new house. House I built in Scarsdale. Now Scarsdale is like the Beverly Hills of New York. It's one of the most affluent communities, highest rated school district, big money. So here I am, I come rolling up on Sunday night, pull in the driveway, brand new three thousand square foot center hall colonial, Come in, sit down, house not even finished yet. He goes, do think? I said, Oh, it's nice. And he goes, Yeah, I got no mortgage. I said, What? What? Never mind, he's thirty two years old. Wow. What do mean got no mortgage? He says, well, the house I built in Tuckahoe, I sold, made good money on it. I bought this building lot over here for cash. It was a house in the middle of two lots, knocked it down, subdivided the lot, kept one for myself, sold off the other one. I got no mortgage. So now I'm like, this electrician thing sounds lucrative. Okay, tell me more. And we talked about basic means and methods and what an electrician does every day. And the more I heard, the more I liked. And I walked out of there that night and said, okay, I got a plan. I am gonna get my electrical license by the time I'm twenty five. I'm gonna build a house by the time I'm thirty. I'm all set, man. That's it. I'm gonna be an electrical And that was it. I pretty much said that I'm executing on that plan. I like this idea. And I, you know, the more and more I did, the more and more I got into it. You know, I was pretty good at it. I was probably a foreman after about two years because we worked non union. There was no apprenticeship program, but I went to school and took classes on the National Electric Code. And I wanted to get as much information as I could because, you know, I had a plan and I had to execute on it. So fast forward, it's, you know, about six, seven years later, I decided time. At that time I had left my cousin. I worked for him for about five years, six years. Went to go work for another company that did predominantly industrial type electrical work because that's what I gravitated towards. I was, I got bored very easily. I learned how to wire a house pretty quick and it was like, yeah I could do this with my eyes closed. Want to learn some other stuff now. Sound a little more challenging. Yeah. I had a partner that I worked together with at the company we were at and we decided that we were gonna be, his name was Mike, we were gonna open D and M electrical. And we kind of found out or I found out after the first two years or so that we had different visions as to what the company was going to be like. And I bought him out in nineteen ninety five, right after I got married. Through the course of that time I've used that whole get bored easily as a way to push me into vertical markets. I was never interested in doing the same thing everybody else did. I wanted to always do something different. So while, you know, everybody else was wiring houses, we were out doing stuff like explosion proof wiring and propane plants and gas stations. And one of the things we used to do is wire these illuminated bus shelters where the people would wait for the bus and put signs in And we used to actually how to run the wire up on the utility's pole and used to put a ladder and a safety belt. And then I got to the point where I said, you know we're gonna buy a bucket truck and make this easier. So then I started looking around and saying, well what can I do with that bucket truck? And I'm like, you know what? I can I can do parking lot lighting and we could do street lighting and little by little all of that evolved? We're doing gas stations, lot of gas station work. Then nineteen All in your, like the same area where you kind of started? Yep. Pretty much right in this whole general vicinity where we're based Cool. And come nineteen ninety nine we were doing work for a company that was keeping us real busy building gas stations and they said, so what are you gonna do at the end of the year? What do mean? Federal mandates up and all these gas stations had to be rebuilt by the end of nineteen ninety nine. We're done. There's no more to build. So I'm panicked. Like, what are you guys gonna do? Oh, we got a new gig. We're gonna start building cell phone towers. And I said, that sounds pretty cool. Oh, yeah. I'm I'm in for that. And we we got involved building cell phone towers, and the next thing you knew, we were subcontracting all the whole line work and underground distribution, all the high voltage stuff out to a couple of couple of old guys that retired from the utility. One of my foreman at that point we were union shop now. We had we've become union in nineteen ninety seven. One of my foreman says, hey. We're giving away the lion's share to work. Why aren't we doing this high voltage work? I said, I don't know how to do this work. You know how to do it? Well, the union's got classes. I'll go take classes. So will you go take a couple of bunch of guys with you if they can if they agree, and they'll go take and get certified and get all the qualifications you need. I'll buy the equipment. And they did that. Let me clarify for for those high voltage to you is not four eighty. High voltage for you is fourteen four or higher. Right? Thirteen thousand volts. So technically, it's called medium voltage, and that's five thousand to thirty five thousand volts. And that's that's a mainstay of our business. Okay. So, you know, high voltage what you see strong on the power lines around the neighborhood. Yep. Yep. We're talking about overhead power lines that go to transformers and run long distances. See for my crazy industry on the mechanical side, we think high voltage is four eighty three Yeah. Yeah. And most electrical contractors do too. Yeah. So yeah. So we got into that market and then the cell phone tower market kind of dried up in the early two thousands because well we built all the cell phone towers they needed and we realized hey this this this utility work is this good market and we started to scale that and get into that deeper and by the probably mid 2000s we were doing storm restoration work all over the country when there were hurricanes. We had cruise alignment going over and we pretty much tripled our sales just by adding that facet to our market. So yeah, we've always always looked for those vertical markets, new things. Today we're involved with things like battery storage. You know, we built some of the very first battery storage facilities in New York State. That was back in twenty seventeen. And back then, that was three hundred and fifty kw. It was a good sized site. And today, we're building sites five to twenty megawatts. So Wow. Tremendous, tremendous plants. And we're doing them as an EPC, which means we engineer, procure, and construct. So we're design builders on that level. So, always wanted to do different than what everyone else is doing. So, know leverage on our skills and relationships and you know abilities and we're still moving into vertical markets today. I think that that separates you right there from the herd because so many people get stuck in in what they grow up doing quote unquote and they don't venture out, you know, like when the gasoline or the fuel stations petered out, a lot of people just say, okay, I'll go back to doing, you know, up at work or or whatever. Yep. And you know, having that ability to say, yeah, that sounds good. I'm going with you and we're going to learn that that niche piece of the market. So how many folks do you have working now? What what size corporation are you? Our average number of employees is probably somewhere around thirty five to forty. Okay. We're gonna see a a growth spurt this year because just with the backlog we have. But with those number of people, it's funny because people look at our gross sales on paper and they go, are you doing almost twenty million dollars a year? What what do you got? A hundred guys working for you? We're like, no. We're thirty five people and they look at you. How could you do that kind of volume? Well, that's one of the metrics I look at in business is dollars sale revenue per man hour. Know how how efficient are you? And people look at me and they go, I I never of that KPIs. Well, I hate that term because personally, I think all those other ones are all BS. So I like I look at statistics that are meaningful to me, not what's meaningful to, you know, some paper pusher down the road there who came up with some great, you know, wrote a book on some metric that really means nothing. And never pulled a wire in his life. Exactly. So at the end of the day, you know, we we I learned early in my career, when you stop trying to be all things to all people, you can focus on the niche you want to be in and you'll focus on the customers that need that niche. And you'll find yourself that instead of doing what everybody else does and dropping your pants as low as you can to get the job, you'll find out that you could start actually making a profit on there and you don't have to justify your price. You're actually one of the only games in town and and you're gonna be And you're sought after. People come looking for you because of what you do. Correct. Now I love the revenue per person. I've used that metric a lot in my life. You know, I think about it like this. The commodity that so many people play on is price. And I hate that because I think that it just ruins our our craftsmanship. It puts a bad taste in people's mouth. What whatever you want to assign to it is sucks. But if you look at it as you have forty bullets and you want to polish those bullets up really, really cleanly and you want to use those bullets so that you're making the most margin per man hour that you can because that's what you have to offer the industry, are skilled trades people who can go do this. And I think that naturally leads me into the trade mentor mindset that you and I both share that in order to perpetuate not only niche markets, but the market in general, because my market, I sold my company, I was a data center guy. And that was our specialty as an independent contractor is being able to compete against the OEMs with independent contracting because we were good at it. And that's what we focused on and that's what we trained on. And we always got a higher price than Joe Blow because we knew what the hell we were doing. How does you looking forward and and not only from a business aspect but from an industry and and you you strike me as the kinda guy who wants to give back obviously because of what you do. How does all that play into the creation of Trade Mentor? So we're gonna roll back and back get into my early years in the trades where this all started. So when I made the decision not to go college, I got a lot of pushback from friends of mine who said, oh, you're taking the easy way out. You're be a a redneck. You're gonna wear flannel shirts and be in a bowling league. I hear you, brother. Listen. I wore plenty of flannel. I own plenty of flannel shirts. Right? So, you know, there was kind of a little bit of a joke, but it really wasn't a joke because it bothered me a lot because I felt like the skilled trades were looked down as less than a degreed worker. And I looked at what a lot of degreed workers had and they didn't know anything compared to some of the people I worked with for some of the smartest people I ever met. And they were well rounded and well versed. And that whole concept that the blue collar worker was denigrated back when I started And again, we're talking about the mid nineteen eighties. And I'm I'm gonna finish my my story about community college. I had already registered for community college. And to get my money back, I had to go meet with the dean of engineering and request a refund. So I thought this would be pretty simple. And I take a half a day off one morning, and I go to the school. And I sit down with the dean, and he comes in, and he looks at me, and he goes, what's this I hear, boy? You want your money back? He was a really ominous looking guy. He was about six five, two seventy five. Not not in a good way. Really. It looked like he was actually a it was a bit of a mess, but he was he was a burn victim and half of his face was badly scarred. So he was quite intimidating looking. And he had a scowl on his face and he looked at me and what is this here I want? You want your money back? Very respectfully I said to him, well yeah you know my guidance counselor recommended that I go you know work for the summer for my cousin. And, yeah, I I, you know, I really, really I I worked as electrician. And this I I know what I wanna do. I you know, I wanna I've got goals. I wanna get my electrical license by the time I'm twenty five and open my own business. And, you know, I wanna build a house by the time I'm thirty. So, you know, I really found what I want and yeah if you could just sign off and give me my money back I'd be real happy about it. And he looks he goes, you're lazy boy. Excuse me? You're lazy. You just need somebody like me to kick your ass. I don't think you're listening. I said, did you hear what I said? He goes, you wanna be a wire jerk. No. I wanna be an electrical contractor. I wanna have electricians work for me. And I said it in a manner that I really wanted to contradict his wire jerk in a professional way. And he spent the next hour ripping into me basically telling me that I was everything that was wrong with our world today and was lazy and I was taking the easy way out. And after about an hour, him just ripping into me, he looked and he said, so what do you say? And I said, want my money back. That's the address where you sent it. I got up and walked out. And I haven't thought about him again. You know, he, I would probably have never thought about him again. It probably would been such a meaningless experience had I not got my first public work contract at Westchester Community College. And as I go to the kickoff meeting, I'm walking down the hallway and who's coming the other way and I see him looking and you couldn't miss this guy. And the one thing that dawned on me was that he was in the same cheap suit that he was wearing the day he ripped into me ten years ago. Ten years earlier. And I was gonna oh, was gonna run up to him and I was gonna tell him off. And I looked and I said, nah. You know what? Just gonna walk away because a guy like you, he ain't gonna it's a waste of my time and my money. And I walked away. And I and again, I probably would have never thought of him again if it had if that hadn't happened. But, again, the respect for the skilled tradesmen, the respect for the industry. Right? And look look what's happened. Educators have vilified the trades for so long that we now have lost it. And it's a twofold problem. Okay? We have a gap of five people retiring for every two coming in. So we got a problem with that. Couple the fact with, I believe, we have a problem on the management and supervisory side because who filled that void in the trades? Well, a lot of time, these were day laborers who English wasn't their first language. They weren't very proficient. They weren't very well educated. Now they learned how to turn wrenches and build things and they could read a tape measure. But years ago, and again this is how I was raised and this is how my company was built. You got a sharp kid. You took him. He was a journeyman. He became a foreman. Maybe he became a general foreman or superintendent. And then, you know, as time went on, we need somebody in house. We need a new estimator. Got brought in as an estimator. Worked as an estimator. Who better to quantify what's needed on a job, think three dimensionally, than a guy who's built the job his whole life, and understand all those general conditions and all the things that happen in the real world. And then if he did good, you made him a project manager. And many of those guys over the years became project executives, vice presidents, presidents of companies. Fast forward to today, where does that management structure come from? Well, you go to college to get a degree in construction management. I've seen this in my own company. You hire one of these guys. He goes out on the job site. The foreman's doing something. And the guy says, why are you doing it that way? Because that's the way you build a job. Well, why don't you do this, this, this, and this? And they look at him and they go, stupid office guy. And that guy will never have any credibility ever again. We've taken the ability to have that career progression away because we have such a lack of supervision. We can't afford to take those guys and move them into the field. And the newer guys, the younger guys, when English is your first language and maybe you've only had a little better than a grade school education because you came from some Central American country where, you know, education was not the way it is in the United States. Those guys are not going to write a proposal. They are not going to write a nasty gram response with forty eight hour notice letter. They just do not have those skill sets. So we've hurt the industry, I believe, on two ends. Not just on the labor side but on the management side. So we need to get back to getting young intelligent people who are interested in the skilled trades need to show them that a, you can make a great living here. B, there is no shame in blue collar work. C, there is a huge unlimited opportunity for potential. So we fast forward now to your question. Why trade mentor? So I was involved with another group, obviously, as you know, and I was on their board of directors. And while I was on their board of directors, one of the most, probably most important things I ever heard from a parent was we need information and I said what do you mean and she said well my son you know said listen you know I'm not going to college. That's not for me. But I'm interested in being a plumber. So she's okay. Well, let's go talk to your guidance counselor. So the two of them go to the guidance counselor. Says, well, you know, he's not interested in going to college, but maybe you could help us out with some trade schools. And the guidance counselor says, I can't help you with that. Now what does she mean I can't help? Some people say, well, she just doesn't understand, doesn't know, hasn't been trained. A lot of times it means she's not allowed to help them because that statistic that all of these suburban schools gravitate towards is percentage of kids going on to college. So to preserve that statistic, what does she tell them? You should go look at community college. So now she's done her job. She can check the box. He's going to a college. They preserve their statistic. So they go and visit the community college. And they say to the dean there saying, well, my son's interested in being a plumber. Oh, yeah. You know what? We have a plumbing one zero one course. In fact, you can't even apply to the plumbers apprenticeship until you take our plumbing one zero one course, which is complete BS. But Right. Not any different. So they sign him up for plumbing one zero one. He shows up, goes to class, comes back after a couple days. Says, mom, the guy teaching teaching the class is not a plumber. B, we don't have any hands on experience. We're we're it's just all book, and and nobody's paying attention. It's a complete joke. And, like, I don't know what I'm doing here. So luckily, somebody said to them, you should go down to the union hall and talk to the apprenticeship director. They go to the apprenticeship director, he says, yeah. You you didn't need that course. The only prerequisite to sign up for art is is a GED or a high school diploma. That's all you need. But, unfortunately you missed. We do a recruitment every two years. You missed the recruitment. So you know you'll have to wait. So the story ends pretty good. The kid gets a job up in New Hampshire working for in a submarine factory as a steamfitters apprentice. So okay. He's good but the fact of the matter is it really just resonated with me that there is no place for a parent or a kid to go to get good accurate information. Then couple this with what I call the TikTok crowd. We have a bunch of people that I like to describe as posers, and they are either not from the industry or they're on the periphery of the industry, and they're pontificating about the problems within the industry. Well, if you're not in the industry, how could you possibly know the problems of the industry? And they say, well, this is what kids are telling me on TikTok. Okay. Wow. Okay. And usually, they have no meaningful information. They don't understand what an apprenticeship is. We've we've got a guy out there who's talking about being an apprentice, and he's like, yeah. You know, you know, you've been an apprentice for two years, and you should be getting your journeyman's license since hold on a second. If you're a real apprentice, you are an apprenticeship program, you're registered in the state, you have a prescription of education and hours worked. It takes four to five years to complete an apprenticeship. So don't tell kids that their boss is ripping them off because they are doing journeyman level work and not getting paid or compensated for it. They're being paid to learn. They're being paid to go to school. It's not costing them a dime. So let's not confuse that. So there's so much confusion out there, and there's so much BS that's being generated by people that are basically just creating what I call clickbait. So enter trade mentor dot org. Right? So obviously, I'm I'm fortunate enough to have a great network of people that are industry professionals like yourself, who, like me, wanna give back to the industry for multiple reasons. Yes. This industry has been good to me, and I wanna give back. Yes. We need to look at the advancement of the industry when we have a gap of five people exiting and two coming in. So this is self preservation as well. But ultimately Yeah. Even though you hated math, that that's an easy equation. Yeah. Exactly. And you know what I learned? Math is actually not so bad when you put a dollar sign in front of those numbers. I got very good at math when you put a dollar sign in front of them. I like it. So at the end of the and it's pretty that's pretty ironic because one of the things that I I I excel at as a as a business owner, my accountants always like to joke with me. He's like, you're one of the few guys that gets it. Like, you actually understand the numbers. You know if you're making money. You know about these things. You know, there's an entire bunch of people out there that, you know, they do their books on the cash basis. They hand their checkbook to the accountant who tells them at the end of the year whether they made money or not and how to write for a check for taxes. So obviously, you know, there's there's a lot of contractors out there that know how to build things, but they never learned the business end of things. Right? They depend on other people. And that's going be a component of Trade Mentor as well. For the young guy who says, You know, I'm interested in being a contractor. I'm interested in being an entrepreneur. We're going to find and we're going to provide resources. Mentors. People like you and me who can say to them, Okay, heard you want to open your own business. Let's talk about that. Let them understand, you know, insurance and accounting and all the different things that need to be, you know, all all sorts of governmental requirements, OSHA, all these things that guys don't understand. But initially here, we're focused is gonna be the entry level worker and getting them that information saying, listen. There's a lot of ways you can get into this trade. Right? We're gonna talk about pre apprenticeship programs, which I love a lot. Apprenticeship programs are obviously the the the gold standard, but not everybody's gonna get into one. Right? They're competitively awarded, and you're lucky enough to get into a a a multi employer apprenticeship program, you're probably going to do very well. But not everybody's going to get into that. Right? So we've got trade schools, we've got on the job training, workforce development opportunities. We're going to have a database of all these opportunities on TradeMentor. And originally that was the the probably the the first thought. The way we were gonna package this. And then the realization that there needs to be a face to face conversation like you and I are having. And that became the bigger part of TradeMentor. So when the website rolls out, I've actually changed our whole development platform to take the focus away from the resource database and move it to the one on one mentoring. So you're gonna be able to go online. You're gonna be able to request the mentoring session. You're gonna say, you know, my name's Joe. I live in Cleveland, and I'm interested in being an electrician. We're gonna match you up with somebody in that area who can give you regionally specific information and say, okay, Joe. Awesome. So what do you what do you want? What do you know about being an electrician? Well, I'm not really sure. You know? Alright. Do you wanna know what an electrician does every day? Yes. Have those dialogues. Talk about it. Give them the truth. Say, listen. There's gonna be days where you're gonna work in a muddy trench, and it's gonna be cold and wet. And there's gonna be beautiful spring days where you're gonna get to work outside, and everybody in an office is jealous. There's going to be days in the winter where it's going to be snow and it's going to be windy and it's going to be cold. There's days you're going to work on a hot roof. There's days you're to work inside a building and the air conditioning is going to be on. You're going to have a lot of different scenarios. Let them know what to expect. Give them realistic expectations. Real life. Yeah. You know? So let me pause for a second because you you said something a while ago that that I think about a lot. I don't necessarily have the answer yet, but true apprenticeships being competitive. My side of the house, the mechanical through the United Association are recruiting just like every contractor is recruiting. So our company, nine thousand people at ServiceLogic, they're half union, half non union. Okay. Depending on the geography. Right. Our union based companies don't have the ability to pull off the bench because if you're on the bench right now, you should be for a reason. So I'm just, what are your thoughts and how do we maybe, I don't know if partnerships the right word or the word is work together more closely with the unions to help recruit as well as our non union brother and out there who also have a need to fill. How do you think about that, Doug? Well, the way I look at it is is even if you have that mindset where you wanna be in a a union apprenticeship program or be in a a union worker eventually, It's never going to hurt you to start in a non union environment and maybe you're not going to school, maybe you're not learning. But you know what? I can tell you that I sit on many many apprenticeship review interviews over the years, for the past twenty years. And if we say to a kid right now, so what are you doing right now? And he says, oh I work non union for so and so electric. I've been doing so for two years. So why do you want to get into the program? Well I'm not getting any schooling or anything and I really really know that I need to learn more theory and I really want to put, You come and tell us that, man, you are getting a really high grade on that interview. Right? So provided you did okay on the on the written exam, you're gonna do really good and you got a good chance of getting it. Now, like I said, let's pretend we only take in twenty five guys a year. Right? That still leaves maybe there's a hundred guys in a particular area who are interested in that job. Right? Two hundred. Well, okay. So one of the things that we look at too here and a program that we've started locally and again it's all over the country with electricians. They have a program called a CWCE program where you've been a non union electrician and you're working, you've got some skills, and now the union's trying to be able to be competitive with non union competition. And you know what? You don't always need, you know, all journeymen on a job. And, you know, you only got you have a certain ratio of of apprentices. So now these workers get recruited as, you know, kind of something in between. They're not a journeyman that are been won through a five year program and testing and formal education, but they're certainly not apprentices. And now you come up with a blended rate. So now you're doing three things. Right? You're bringing guys in who are now getting a little lower pay rate, but they're getting benefits, four zero one k. They're getting, you know, benefit funds. All of these resources, they probably weren't getting on the nonunion side. So there's a door for them to come in there. Right? So, again, the way I look at it is union shops pay the most money. So at the end of the day, if your goal is to get into that format, you wanna be the best of the best. You aspire to be the best. So there's gotta be a doorway. The apprenticeship program is one doorway. We've got, again, on the electrical the CWCE programs which opens the doors to people to get in. And the fact of the matter is we're always going to have people that are going to start out in the industry and they're going to work for companies. Some of them are good companies. Some of them maybe aren't as great companies. They don't invest in education. There's plenty of non union companies out there that are spending money to educate and and and and run apprenticeship programs and Yeah. You know, are given benefits. And maybe they can do it, you know, more efficiently because of whatever their particular metrics are. They have lower attrition rates. Whatever it is. But the fact that matter is is that there's a a lot of different ways to get into the trades. And that and again, from the trade mentor standpoint, we're gonna show you all those ways. And you can pick your pathway, and you can come and talk to us about that pathway. And you can come talk to somebody like you or me who could explain all of the different nuances and all of the different ways you can get into the treads and where you can go from there. Well, I think that that's phenomenal and the mechanical has a similar program to kind of complement what the electrical is doing on the CWCE. One more question on your comment. How do we increase the number of apprentices that are taken into a program in any given area? We constantly are trying to do that. I could tell you right now that I sit on a negotiating committee here in in New York, and we are getting ready to come up. Our contract's renewing in April. And one of the what's one of the things we're talking about? More apprentices. And look. It's always that careful balance. You know? We want x number. Union wants x number. They don't want to oversaturate. And again, we look at attrition rates and we try to say to them, this is x amount of guys are retiring. We need to bring this many in. So it's tough. And you got to have a commitment from the contractors to work them. You know, that's the other piece. Right. I mean Well, it's and that's the thing. A lot of times what happen is you'll you'll get a slow period for a couple of months where jobs aren't starting, and there's one or two apprentices that are maybe unemployed for a couple of weeks. And it's like, oh, we can't bring another class in. And it's like, guys, come on. We all have this work on hand. You know? I mean, I get it. This this just this is a small situational timeline. Disciple. We try to make sure. Yeah. And we try to make sure that we keep apprentices, you know, employed all the time. But the fact of the matter is a lot of guys do public work. So there's ratios, you know, three to one. You physically can't put another apprentice on that job because you're out of ratio. So there's there's situations like you said, things are cyclical. But, you know, overall you got to look at the big picture. How many people are retiring and you know all those types of things that are really really important to getting the right number of apprentices and again sometimes it's a mixture of what we have we also have bring in helpers because in those programs and again we don't we don't really call it a CWCE program that verbiage is used in other parts of the country we have an M program like a market recovery type program and so those journeymen that come in they get helpers with them. We're working on education. We've got a system now where everybody's got educational opportunities and we're tying it to a merit based philosophy. Whereas you take this class and this class you've earned a few points and now you get another two dollars an hour and you can move and you could get you know ten dollars an hour more eventually if you take all the classes. So we're you know we're dangling the carrot. We're trying to make better more well educated, well rounded people. So there's an effort out there but it's always a little bit of a negotiation between you know how many people are we taking in versus hey we don't want to take in too many. So you know look that's business. As a contractor I've never been able to hit the perfect balance. You either have too many people or too much work. And you're always trying to balance and junior system to balance it. It's an imperfect system, always will be. Yep. So Doug, I'm super pumped about what's going on at TradeMentor. Just how can people find out more about it? How how can how can we share the the knowledge and and keep up to speed of what's going on? So right now, as our website's being built out, we are going to have we have a landing page in place, trade mentor dot org. You can go right there. Can sign up for updates. You can, put yourself down that you're interested in being a mentor. You can put down that you're interested in being a strategic partner, a sponsor. Anything you want over there, we're keeping that database, and you'll be hearing back from us as we start to roll things out. Obviously, you as you know, you're one of our mentors, which I'm very happy to have. We've got a a great assortment of people, and we're gonna continue to keep acquiring more mentors in different trades, in different parts of the country. And and, you know, the we're we're never gonna have enough. You know we're gonna completely we're gonna have a network that I want to be able to when a kid says I'm interested in being a let me stretch a little bit. Something that we don't really talk about too often. I'm interested in being a millwright in San Francisco. No Minneapolis. We got a company up there that does that. There you go. So that's and that's it right. So we need generally what what what's a millwright right. We yeah Okay. We wanna have hey. We've got a millwright in Minneapolis just for you that can talk to you about that. So, yeah. All these things. This is what we want. We don't wanna be just and we don't we're not gonna just be limited also to to the construction trades because the trades encompasses a lot more than just the basic ones we talk about all the time, carpenter, plumber, electrician, steam fitter, HVAC. We're talking about automotive industry. Right? Yeah. We're talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing's coming back to the US. I tell you what, I don't know if you're seeing it, but I've been getting a ton of emails from companies, foreign companies I've never heard about before saying, hey, by q three twenty twenty six, our US based factory is gonna be open and this product is gonna be available. And we start looking and saying, it's happening. Yeah. It's coming back. It's coming. You know, regardless of your view on politics, there's a lot of money flowing into the country. There is. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, folks, I hope y'all will go check out tradementor dot org. If you are ever in need of real high voltage contracting, check out D and M electrical. Doug's melted heck of a company with a great reputation and continues to build that legacy by employing good people, helping people get to the next level and now giving back to rebuild the pipeline, so to speak of folks retiring because it's the real deal. I am of that age. I'm I'm sixty one. Our youngest baby boomer. And my peers are all going to the house. So we gotta make up for that. Yeah. And I'll add just one more. One more thing. Just because our website isn't up yet, if you know somebody who's interested in the trades and they need some mentoring, you can send an email to mentoring request at trade or trade mentor dot org. It's mentoring request at trade mentor dot org, and we will get your mentor. We'll set up a Zoom meeting just like this, and you'll have somebody to talk to in your area that knows exactly what's going on and can help you make some informed decisions about getting into the skilled trades. Awesome. And also on greg crumpton dot com, I have a tab. If you're on my website, can hit trade mentor from my site as well. It's linked back. Thank you. Appreciate it. Right. Trying to share the share the love. You're more than welcome. There's something I'm passionate about, Doug, and I want to see Trade Mentor and and the whole thing succeed. So I'm proud to support it. But check it out, folks. Trade Mentor dot org. Greg crumpton dot com. I gotta upload my books for all. And deep knowledge. You can check those out at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And if you wanna learn more about those, it's, triple w dot deep knowledge dot me, deep knowledge dot me. So check them out, buy the book, share it, give it to some friends. I have had remarkably cool stories about people giving my books to youngsters who don't know exactly yet what they want to do. Maybe nudge them towards having a look at the trades because as Doug told us so eloquently, this is not a fallback program. This is the real deal. This can be your primary focus in life and have a great career doing it. Check it out. Stay tuned for more. We appreciate you joining us. Doug, thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing some insights and your knowledge and really appreciate what you're doing, man. You're making a dent up here. Thank you. I appreciate it. So check it out. And until next time, take care and be safe out there.