Austin Linney:
Thank you, man. Thanks for having me. I think we’ll start here. I spent most of my life in hospitality, high end hotels, sold wine for 20 years and got into real estate. Started doing Airbnbs back before people even knew what it was like. I was old school, man, Cleaning myself, working two jobs. Red Ridge, Steadport, then got into real estate. Loved it, scaled it, did Airbnb hotels. I taught people Airbnb in multiple states. I was flying everywhere. I tell everybody I was getting 128 messages a day at scale. I mean, it was just crazy. I can’t stand the sound of the Airbnb click to somebody’s phone. I will leave dinner if I hear it. I can’t. It’s like PTSD. But what happened is the true story. You start getting into masterminds and you start getting into people that fall businesses or own bigger real estate portfolios in the market. Look, I am one of the wildest people ever. I’ve done 800 episodes and I’ve never written down anything of a podcast. Like, I’ve just, I’m off the cuff. Every speech I’ve had is off the cuff. But what you don’t know about me is I do like rules because rules allow you to know where to step. And what I feel like has happened in the last couple of years, since COVID especially, is nothing makes sense in the real estate market. Nothing makes sense. The lenders don’t make sense. The pricing don’t make sense. Like nothing made sense. And so I said to myself, okay, I think I’m going to sit this one out. I don’t think I want to get involved. I got divorced and I got laid off from my private equity job in the same seven day stretch. So we sold our properties at the high end. It’s great. I had three properties that I owned personally. I sold them through the divorce with a partner with me. And in that time, I read a book called Buy then Built. And I go, okay, this makes sense. So what happened was, we had $26 million worth of real estate under contract at the same time. So between myself and my partners, we had a 20 unit in Destin, a hotel in Treasure Island, Florida, we had a wedding venue in Tennessee and 130 unit in Texas we were all going to close. It was going to be fine, it was easy to operate. You don’t understand, I could do this in my sleep. Like, it’s fine. I spent 20 years in hospitality hotels it’s no brainer. And a 10 day stretch between due diligence, insurance, sewer stuff with the city and Tennessee and just bad partnerships, they all fell out. And I said to myself, I’m done. I’m done with real estate. I don’t want to do this anymore. It doesn’t make sense. It’s so hard to get a deal across the board. Prices don’t make sense. And so literally 14 days later, I had my first business under contract.

A.J. Lawrence:
So you just pulled the trigger and were like, F this, I’m gone and I’m going to go buy something in 10 days because I hate you. Because I’ve been searching for a year and a half and like, I kiss so many freaking toads. How in 10 days did you get a business under contract?

Austin Linney:
First of all, I don’t know. Okay. Second of all, I have an obsessive personality for sure. And I think when I get on something, really get into it. And what happened was, and this is this true story, we had been looking since I made the actual decision that, hey, we’re going to find a business, we’re going to buy. I had been casually looking and nothing on the coast and nothing in Texas where we were looking made sense. In New Jersey, the multiples didn’t make sense. They were too big. Nothing we can sink our teeth into getting outbid. And we said to ourselves, okay, what would it look like if we look somewhere that nobody else is looking or not looking as much? And that’s when we started getting into Ohio. Not that people are not looking there, but less people are looking at rural towns. And so we found a brokerage out of LA actually called Business Exit. And they do a lot of good business. They have a good close rate. And we found a business. I was in Estes Park. I lived in an RV at this time. I was traveling the country with my fiancé. So I was in Estes Park, I called the broker that day. We got to talking, she’s out in LA. I got on a call with the seller the next day. It was a real estate brokerage with Airbnb management company and then building. So I knew it like it was easy. And so we went through due diligence ,some of the deposits didn’t match up, and then rates were climbing. So it was like a weird time. And when I knew the seller would not agree to the price and this deal was going to fall apart, that same broker had the deal that we bought in our portfolio. And so I started looking at that business. I had never looked really at an HVAC Plumbing. We were going to go more on the real estate side first, but it started making sense. And the seller had been in the trade for 50 years, had owned this business for 25 years, the numbers looked okay. They were growing. It was an interesting market. It was rural. But he doesn’t talk on the phone. He’s hard of hearing. So she said, look, he’s old school. You got to meet him in person. I said, look, I’m in Texas right now. She goes, look, put in an offer. If he likes it, he’ll say he likes it and then you can fly up and go meet him. I said, look, if I put in an offer, he says he likes it. I’ll be up there three days from now. And so I put in an offer on Friday and he said, I don’t hate it. And so I flew up three days later. I sat in his home for two and a half hours, and we talked. And he said, let’s do this. And then he said to me, which it’s never happened to anybody else, so please know this is. This. This whole experience is so random. After he gets to know me and we meet for the second time, I’m up here for a longer period of time. Once we’re done with due diligence, we agree on a price. It’s moving towards closing. We’re 60 days out. He said, austin, I’m done. He said, I can’t do this anymore. I got one big project. I don’t really want to be involved in the business. I don’t really trust the office manager. He’s like, would you run the business till closing? So he’s like, I’ll pay you. I was like, is this, like, normal? He’s like, no, it’s not really normal. And I was like, okay. So I called my fiancé and I said, so we’re moving to Pennsylvania in seven days. Start packing up everything. And we left. And so I’ve been running that business sinc that day. What’s not talked about and I haven’t really shared much, is we actually didn’t close for another year.

A.J. Lawrence:
Was it the seller? Was it the deal?

Austin Linney:
We found a lot of misdoings from the office manager. $250,000 stolen out from underneath us amongst some other things. So the long and short of it is we had to get the seller. I uncovered the buried bodies basically and the seller had to agree to sell it to us 100% owner financing, which he did. And so we bought it 100% owner financed with the real estate, 15 acres at 5% interest over 15 years. So all the headache and the stress, I also got the deal of a lifetime.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I mean, that structure is pretty good. I had a close to that but it was because the seller kept changing his story. I walked because I was getting lied to. But you, it’s so funny. There was lies in the deals, just not the sellers. So it’s worth.

Austin Linney:
That’s debatable. But I digress. I mean, there’s many, many other things in many ways. Here’s what I think about business people, especially businessmen, I think that we read a lot and I think that we think we know a lot. But somehow my fiancé seems to have the best truths to me. And something she said to me 16 months ago that I think everybody should hear, the person involved in this deal, meaning the seller and the seller’s lawyer, they have never misrepresented how they behave, act accordingly, good or bad.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep.

Austin Linney:
I think that we as people expect others to care as much as we care, but their motivations are different than our motivations are. Until you figure out where everybody’s motivated in, you don’t know where the playing field is.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. Are they looking to get out? Are they looking for the top dollar? What combinations? You know, it’s obvious it’s always money but what variation thereof. That piece, that is pretty good. All right. You buy this, and we haven’t touched on your podcast Construct Your Life, we haven’t talked about your consulting. Let’s kind of focus on this HVAC. You worked in it for a year, you’ve acquired it. Because you and I were chatting just before and you’re really focusing on something really interesting that I think crosses almost every type of business, it’s the in pursuit of revenue. the type of clients that get you to there really impact the type of business you’re building. And you know, why don’t you kind of walk through that, you know, what you’re looking at and what you’re realizing as you build it. Because I had a similar experience with my agency and I think we can kind of go back and forth and, you know, just really dive into that in a bit.

Austin Linney:
I think it’s important to understand the people that you’re working with. Meaning the customers. Right. We do a lot of county work for a local county about 20 minutes from us. We’ve been doing the work for five years before I came along. They write checks and they don’t care. Show up, do the work. You do a great job. Cool. Then let’s piece apart the HVAC business as a whole. Have you in your life, you’re older than I, have you ever run into a pleasant general contractor?

A.J. Lawrence:
No.

Austin Linney:
It’s very rare. So general contractor by trade, meaning new construction or new construction commercial is basically a game of who’s going to be in trouble today. Is the electrician in trouble? We’re behind. As the general manager on a $2.5 million project we’re working right now says, oh, it’s the classic thing over engineered and underplanned. That’s basically new construction. So while I might really like to see that $330,000 check that they send in, it also took 60 days to get it. We also had to outlay a quarter of a million dollars in equipment, a quarter of a million dollars in labor, and then they’re also going to keep 10% for retainage. So my ego might tell me, this is what I tell my CEO, this is my new thing I came up with. Commercial HVAC is for the ego. Residential HVACs for the sanity. Let me walk you through the different things. This commercial project, one of the big commercial projects we’re doing, was delayed seven months and we had a quarter of a million dollars worth of stuff sitting in our warehouse they don’t care about. So that’s one. Or Frank calls, hey, I need an AC. Let me give you one third of the deposit today. It’s installed tomorrow and you collect the rest of the money the next day.

A.J. Lawrence:
Wham, bam.

Austin Linney:
We’re not even talking about the fact that my six people that are working down there, it’s an 1:40 minutes from our location, and they’re away from their families all week. Now, most of them are single and don’t have kids, so it’s fine. But there’s that stress, too. That’s what I don’t think people talk about, is what friction does the revenue create within your business. Net profit is important, but what friction does it create?

A.J. Lawrence:
And you know, even the type of team. Like, if you’re doing these big county, you’re going to probably need a different type of expertise. Similar skill set, obviously, but probably a little bit more. You’re going to need more credentials, more stuff. So probably a higher type of price tag when it comes to the talent to service these large lumpy revenue pieces. Just because, like I always think, when you were saying that, it just made me think of like with my agency, we moved very much up into sort of that pursuit of the Global 500. And it was fun, you know, big problems, big smart people everywhere and lots of stuff. But very similar, we had a project with a consumer product goods company and so much money, so much money. And it got delayed five months and that was five months I wasn’t paying my team that I had to have to be able to service this.

Austin Linney:
I don’t think people sit around and I don’t think they actually talk about what are the actual drivers of their business. And let me walk you through a simple scenario. The lowest ticket item in the business is the service HVAC side of the business. It’s the lowest ticket, the most cumbersome with the amount, right? Some days my guys have four in a row, or if it’s -20, they’ll have eight in one day. They’re in and out hour two. But what you don’t realize, it’s the number one lead source organically for installs. So that low ticket item, you might not feel it when it’s a $200, $300, $400 check. But you haven’t paid for that lead. You already had that lead. Here’s the thing, everybody’s saying, oh, you don’t like commercial. No, no, no, you have me mistaken. I love commercial maintenance, retrofit and replacement. I don’t love new construction. We’re going to walk a possible maintenance contract from Twitter, mind you, lead from Twitter, they’ve got 1835 to 15 ton HVAC systems just to start. That’s a huge contract, right? But they might expand, right? Our 15 to 20, $12,000 HVAC maintenance contract for each business has also led to two, mind you, $500,000 expansion jobs. We’ll go do business with that client because they know what to expect. And this is hard for me because I want everything. The joke with me and my CEO is let’s open 30 locations and go to work is that there’s a time and place. And I think as a business scales they actually lose more of what they do and get more focused on what they actually do. I think the bigger issue is that we’re in a rural market and there’s not a lot of people to service them. So we want to do everything, but we can’t do everything. And we’re actually doing a disservice to that person by taking on that work. And that’s hard, that’s hard to get them to understand. It’s hard for us to understand.

A.J. Lawrence:
One, it’s how much can you grow? Because it’s like as cool as all those projects are, because they’re there and you’re probably one of the few providers around to do it, but the thing is, if you focus so much on that, you won’t be able to service the smaller ones that keep you alive and keep you in this position for the mid things.

Austin Linney:
Well, what’s interesting is we just had an owners meeting right before this. I think what excites me the most about those jobs, these two $2.5 million jobs that we’re doing, it has done multiple things that are untangible to the revenue. And what I mean by that, it’s allowed project managers to level up their skills in managing people. We’ve had to level up the way that we operate as a business to handle a billion dollar company that we’re doing business with that doesn’t mess around. So there are lasting effects within the structure and the confidence of the business that are not going to show up on the P&Ls that will help us in turn. But we would be a lot more dialed in as a company if we did three installs a day, five days a week for the rest of our life.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’ll be that much more efficient and your team, your workflows, your process even going there. All right, so let’s maybe talk, you know, someone’s listening, how did you start focusing on this transition? Because I think almost all of us, when we start running, start a business, if we’re not acquiring, we rub our sticks together. And like I used to joke, it didn’t matter what the revenue was. I would take out a client’s garbage if they would pay us. I didn’t care. But then there came a point around 2 to 3 million where it was like, do we really want that work? It’s going to cost me more. It’s going to do this. I’m going to have to keep these type of people on. I’m going to then have to make sure I get more of that work, to constantly keep those people fed with work so I can afford them, et cetera, et cetera. And it was like, oh, learned a lesson and then I forgot it when I went and grew even further. It was like, how did you start realizing that besides the chunkiness of the revenue, what went into that decision to like let’s transition this to be more of these, you know, put us in the position so we can have that consistency into the business?

Austin Linney:
Well, the first thing was my CEO told me he would kill me if we didn’t change. So that’s the number one. He’s been in the business 20 years. He said, if we’re doing this again-well, the business that we bought was 80% commercial because that’s what the seller loved to do. He was an engineer by trade so he tailored the business so.

A.J. Lawrence:
And new development or commercial?

Austin Linney:
Commercial, little construction, retrofit, maintenance, et cetera. At the time, they did like 10% plumbing, 5% electricity. Now we’re like, we went from like having one plumber to seven. We went from having no electricians to three. So we’re building out those verticals. We just bought a duct cleaning equipment. So it’s more of an understanding of just the different payment cycles and inventory cycles of the commercial side that doesn’t really jive. Now here’s what I will say, and this is something that we talk about on a regular basis, this is important. I think that the commercial business, the bigger stuff, has a place done right. And what I mean by done right is it needs to be its own vehicle and operate solely on its own platform to fund itself. It cannot fund the other parts of the business. So you could take on 2 to 5 million a year but it has to have its own employees, its own project manager doing its thing. You’re taking projects, you’re picking the right customers to work with. If it’s done that way, then I think there’s a place for it. But you have to understand something is that you, as a shepherd of your business and I mean this, so you have no idea how much I mean this. We went from 18 employees to 46 in 13 months, and we plan to do that again probably in the next 12 months. You know when I’m doing good as a CEO? It’s very simple. CEO, owner of a business. When the wives of my employees tell me their husbands happy, that’s when I know I’m doing good. So you have an obligation as an owner to push the company in the vision that makes the most sense to keep everybody busy. No downtime, most efficiency of profit, and that’s the game is to understand. I think that most businesses, and you know what? I’ll call myself out, like I always call myself out because this is the biggest lesson I think I’ve learned because I’m not that person. It’s amazing what having actual data in your business can show you how to go. I’m a field guy. I’m a recruiter. I’m an acquisition guy. I can talk to anybody. I get us new business. I do. Whatever you need. You need a hard negotiation, I’m your guy. I mess with the vendors. But we just went over our biweekly report and we saw the call volume and what it’s looked like over the last three months. We’ve almost tripled call volume. Oh, hey, I know we’re trending in the right direction and I think that 90% of businesses don’t have the actual data to make the decisions necessary.

A.J. Lawrence:
As you’re looking at this trend, isn’t though like June, July, the highest call volume for HVAC?

Austin Linney:
Yes and no. I’m not an Arizona. I’m not at Texas. We have hot spells, but it’s also like 50 degrees in the morning. So yes and no. We had a 95 spell and we got a ton of calls. But that wasn’t what we saw because here’s what’s crazy. We were so busy. And this is a good problem and a bad problem. This business is so weird, I can’t stand it. We are six months out or six weeks out to book an install. Okay, that’s a great problem and a very bad problem because customers that need an AC are going to be pissed right now. We’ve alleviated and cut three weeks off because we added another install team. But we had to turn off ads, certain ads, but we got double the calls with the ads off. I don’t know. Who knows? I mean, is it all the marketing that we did for the last 13 months that’s paying off? You know, like these lag measures? You just don’t know. And for me, the things that make me the most excited is when somebody tells me, your guys were here and they were super professional and they did a great job. Because what’s crazy, and this is my joke with everybody because they think I’m crazy when I say this, but if I say it’s slow enough maybe they’ll realize it. And I’m just using numbers so you understand the scale that we’re talking about. We went from 3.2 million last year and we’re probably going to do 8.5 million this year. That’s a huge. We doubled, tripled the employees, tripled the vans, all great stuff. These are all great stuff. And you want to know the actual measure of how I know if my business is doing good or not is a two sentence Google review. What I’m saying is a review comes in on Google, that is the biggest measure of our company is some rant. Were they in a good mood? Were they in a bad mood? All these great things are going on and that’s the level of the understanding, right? But here’s where you get the secondary nod. There are electricians in the area that have told somebody that works for us who’s a local, not me, that I used to go into jobs a couple years ago that they had done, meaning us, and the work was shit.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep.

Austin Linney:
Now I go in and the work’s great. I’m good. Tap me out, we’re good. And so what I realized is if we don’t focus on the level of service and the quality of service, nothing else matters. Nothing. Do you know what’s the wildest thing, and I’m sure you’ve had the same thing because you work for big companies. I have sat in the offices of $140 million HVAC business. I’ve sat on calls with guys who have literally, I’m not joking when I say this, have bought 40 HVAC companies in the last two years. They’re doing 400 million. We have funds that we talk to that have $2 billion. It’s controlled chaos. Nobody knows what’s going on and you’re just doing what you think is the next best step and that’s really all you can do.

A.J. Lawrence:
Even worse is sometimes I think with the larger companies what you see is the amount of people who need to contribute to earn their value within the organization.

Austin Linney:
Did you play baseball? Did you play baseball as a kid?

A.J. Lawrence:
I did, yeah.

Austin Linney:
I spent time in the country and I spent time in the city. I saw someone, one of the more philosophical people in your life, are a good old timey baseball coach. And one of these things he told me when we were 14 years old that’s always stuck with me is we got a lot of chiefs and not enough Indians.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep, I’ve heard that one.

Austin Linney:
And I think if you are going to scale a business beyond eight figures, meaning that’s the name of the pockets, you are going to have to take credit for less and less. I get none of the credit when we do good and I get all the blame when we do bad.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep. It’s so funny, and I’ve been saying this for years because I came out of, you know, I was a developer and I kept hating what I kept feeling like whatever my lead, you know, the person I reported to, whatever they gave me to do, I was like, this sucks. This is not going to help the client. I’m going to move up. So lead develop this. And then I became a project manager and all this. And it was always kind of like, oh, these idiots are messing up the client thing. Until I became the idiot selling this thing and realize that the only time you’re really good is when no one really knows you’re doing anything. You got to be very careful because there are people who do that differently. But that’s a short term game. I don’t mean like there’s no value being produced and oh, they forgot you exist and your bill is going through. I mean if they don’t, if they’re not stressed, if what you do doesn’t create stress for them but they are getting value, you’ve done it right. And that’s the hard part.

Austin Linney:
This is for every business owner and every coaching or consulting client, there’s a statement that Alex Hormozi said that changed my entire life. And when I say changed my entire life, made me realize what was happening with my coaching clients. It changed my entire life. He said the farther that people get away from the change that you’ve created within them, the more they think they could have done it for themselves.

A.J. Lawrence:
Oh yeah.

Austin Linney:
So you ask for the review, you ask for the data boy early on in the process because after you’ve changed them, they will give you less of the credit.

A.J. Lawrence:
So funny. One of the things I’ve done a lot with the different agencies I’ve had is we’ll do stuff on performance for the right clients. And it’s almost that like, it’s that lovely meme. It’s like, you know, the idiot. We’ll use stuff on performance and then, oh, we can’t do performance. We don’t have control over this. And then it’s like, we do stuff on performance. It’s like, it works if you’re very careful. But what I learned early on when I was in my own idiot phase of it is if you do too good of a job, they’re like, why am I paying you this? I could have just paid you $5,000 to fix this. It’s like so much in the world is that like balance, perception. And often, we used to think it was so great to get a client who was stupid or not stupid, but was making all the bad mistakes. Oh, great, those are the best clients because we’ll fix them. As you said, those are the clients who get mad at you. Eventually you got to find the clients who want to grow, or at least from a marketing agency background.

Austin Linney:
I think that we don’t know there’s multiple things going on with ourselves. What we haven’t touched on is I was a 20 year alcoholic and I’ve been sober for five and a half years. What we haven’t touched on is I was addicted to meth and I was homeless briefly. Like all these things that have shaped me, right? And I think that two things have changed my life. One, admitting that within every situation, no matter what takes place, something is my fault. Meaning what did I play in this role? That’s number one. And then number two is knowing people think it’s a joke. I spent six months, six months, I walk every morning. Just so we’re clear, I’ve done it for five and a half years. I walk every morning, no matter what. I don’t care if it was a nice storm outside, I’m walking. I had a conversation with myself and said, do you want this? Because what you’re embarking on is a babysitter for a lot of employees. What you’re embarking on is not a one year and done thing. This is going to be a long 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Do you want this? Can you live your life without doing this? And the question that came back to me was it wasn’t a question of can you do this? You must do this. You must do it. Because the impact level that you can create is not just within your employees, it’s in the communities that you serve. And you’re affecting their kids and you’re affecting businesses. And so for me, it’s coaching at the highest scale.

A.J. Lawrence:
Consistently. Again and again, rinse and repeat.

Austin Linney:
Exactly. And it’s very boring too. I mean, let’s be honest. The more boring your business is, the better it’s going. So I’m going to get really, like not this right now, but like 2027 when I’m going to start having babies myself and I’m going to switch into a different role of more of a quarterback and kind of acquisition guy. Like I’m going to get really, really good at golf because I’m going to have to keep myself busy to stop metal in the business.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny, I know an entrepreneur who at first I was like, oh, they’re so simple, so simple yet they kept growing, growing, growing. And I’m like, he actually joined the fire, he’s in a volunteer only fire department whatever. And so he basically 24 hours a week. I mean, it’s cool he does this, but it’s more like, what am I going to do? I’m working half a day a week. I have a team that does everything. If I do anything, things are worse. So at this point, this is just one of those things that keeps me away from meddling in the business. I was like, goddamn it.

Austin Linney:
I think that we allow the need to be needed to be placed on top of the business. The business is not going to give you what you need, nor should it. And I think that the business is going to give you what you deserve as long as you respect it. And the thing is that not all bad months are bad months. Not all good months are good months. And I think that I am, by nature, I’m a very empathetic person and I care a lot. And what I’ve been working on for the last two and a half years is to live my life a little more neutral. Don’t get too high, don’t get too low, somewhere in the middle and use other parts of my life to fill up what I need from it, which is to help people and so on and so on. So for me, one of the ways that I continue to help people is provide them jobs, give them a great place to work, training, et cetera. So that’s something. But there’s lots of plans I have, you know, 50 and on that are going to be more giving back into the school systems and stuff like that. And that’s what I’m excited about because this opportunity, I think, I meant to say this in the beginning, why I got out of real estate. Honestly, if you want the honest opinion, I find it to be very boring. Like fall off the table boring. But I also find it to be very myopic. It’s not that complicated and once you figure it out, it’s pretty boring. Business can never be figured out. There are no ceilings. And so I find the problems and the solvability of business and the scalability to my liking. And I’m exactly where I should be now.

A.J. Lawrence:
I like that very much. Because having not been in real estate other than in the most outside of outside, but having been around a lot of the real estate people, it is amazing how repetitive, even in the complexity, the discussion points are. It’s the deal flow and there’s stuff work. But where a business, you have obviously that deal flow craziness, you have the deal structuring craziness, the financing structure. But then, as you said, the people day in, day out, that is the best and the worst. The best is when you find, I used to joke the land of broken toys because I am definitely from the island of broken toys myself. And when you find someone and you see them grow into something amazing, you’re just like, yes, I’ve done this. And then the reverse is when you have someone who’s just like, please hold my hand. And every man and every person has a different. But like the person who needs everything handed to them step by step by step. It’s like you’re just sucking the energy out of this. I want to run away. So, yes, I agree completely with this. Well, all right, we went all over the place a little bit. But as you’re focusing now and you’re looking at that next step, what is it that’s going to define whether you’ve been successful for yourself? Because I like that you’ve already called out that this is not about success being the business for you. Because I think so many of us do get caught up in that. I used to joke or not joke, but when I have my business, someone asked me how I was doing and I would talk about the business. Oh, we had a good month. We did this and that. And it’s like, no, how are you doing? How are you going to go about defining your success down the road?

Austin Linney:
I love a good framework. Like for me, this is such an ambiguous question depending on my mood and how and where I’m at. For me, I sort of see, you know what we always say? We all say we want freedom, right? But what the f^ck is that? Like, that doesn’t mean anything. We actually want options. And so my success is predicated on, for me in the business, it solely on one thing. How many jobs have we created? That’s it. It’s the only thing I look at. It’s my why. It’s the biggest why I have. There’s a reason behind that that’s deep rooted in what I care about. And finding diamonds in the rough and putting them in a system that they can operate and grow as people and support their families, that’s what I care about. So that’s number one for me. But number two is I dropped out of college three times. I don’t have a degree. I built everything off of hard work. And I was a part of a 70 million dollar HVAC deal that went on off of a Twitter connection last year with the biggest fund in America. And the guy said, I’ve been looking for a buyer for three years. I said, I can find your buyer in five minutes. He was like, how? And I’m like, just don’t worry about it. And so for me, I love that a person that’s dropped out of college three times that literally taught himself private equity in a book can be involved or in the room. That’s what’s great about business is that when you get to those levels, it doesn’t really matter where you came from, what you do, what your track record is. It’s who you are, how you make people feel, right? And so for me, as long as I keep showing up in those rooms, providing value and leaving the people in that room better than I found them, that for me is success in my book. Because I know it sounds crazy and we’re in a different world now, and this is 25, 30 years ago. My dad was probably one of the most successful dentists in the state of Texas. I think he was like number one dentist, like sold his practice two years ago. He said something to me at 16. I know the world’s different now, but he said something to me at 16 that’s always stuck with me. He said, Austin, after about 350 grand a year, he said, you can pretty much buy all the same sh*t. Now, granted, who doesn’t want to grow money and buy properties, right? But I realized it’s never been that way for me. I was never going to find my success in a dollar amount. I was going to find it in the opportunities that I provide for myself. I’m a seeker by nature. And as long as I’m providing opportunities for my business and for myself, I think that is where my barometer meets. Because I think that as long as I do that, it’s the oxygen in my blood that will keep me happy for the rest of my life. That doesn’t mean I’ll be making monetary wins off of it, maybe in my 80s. But I don’t think I’ll ever get to a place where I’m not looking at deals, looking at real estate.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, because we can go on and on here. We’re going to probably have to dive in deeper into some of this at a different time. What’s the best way people can learn more about what you’re doing, get in touch with you?

Austin Linney:
So you go to austinlinney.com, you got my podcast, you got me. You can reach out to me there. You got the company that we own, the private equity group that we run. I’m switching more into consulting where I can handle more of the business so I’m still doing some one-on-one coaching but not really pursuing finding clients. So they come to me, great. And we’re a match. Cool. We got the two podcasts. You have Construct Your Life and then you have the Lead IN Podcast. I’m a host for one of my buddies who owns a marketing company. So yeah, I mean, they can reach out to me there. You can reach out to me on Twitter AustinLinney.com. I think that my kind of parting shot for everybody is you’ve read enough books, you’ve listened to enough podcast, whatever it is that you were thinking about doing, just go do it and I promise you, you’ll learn more about yourself than you’ve ever thought. Because the highest form of personal development that I found is running a small business. It has asked me to be more than I have ever thought I was capable of just in the short time that we’ve had it. And I can’t wait to see what it looks like 20 years from now.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool. I am jealous of you being in the field because I miss it. And that’s why I’ve been looking to acquire and then also probably focusing more on growing, given how many toads I’ve been kissing recently. Every deal is crazy, but yeah. Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Austin Linney:
Man, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, sir.

A.J. Lawrence:
We gotta keep talking. Hey, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Go check out Austin, go check out his website. We’ll put his Twitter on. He has a great Twitter. Matter of fact, I loved one of the things he was just saying, I meant to bring this up. I’m going to do at the end whatever. You had one of the best sort of like, get your week going things. You just tweeted this out. Like, you just go and you shake all of your team’s hand and thank them for doing that. And I was just like, that’s just so cool. I was just like, dang it. Yeah, that’s a very cool thing.

Austin Linney:
An hour spent Monday morning by a business owner, shaking your hands, smiling at them, asking them how their weekend was, will give you more ROI on your business than the other 40 hours that you’ll spend in your business that week.

A.J. Lawrence:
What I think, everyone listening to this, is what you’ll see from going through Austin’s, and I’ve definitely learned this from talking to him a few times now. He really SMBs. He’s not just kind of talking about this and kind of trying to build his audience. He’s not like, oh, I did this little thing, and now I’m going to try and make it 20 times bigger. Not that we know anyone out there doing that, but he literally is living his SMB life, and it is cool and really insightful to kind of dive into it. So go check him out. And hey, everyone, thank you so much for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.