Today's Guest

Soon after graduating, Brady bought an outdated Nashville home, determined to completely remodel the entire house. Even though this would be his first large-scale building project, Brady imagined the home completely transformed, even down to the tiniest details. As the years went by, his reputation grew, as did his skill set, resources, and geographic reach. Today, even though he is the owner of one of the most in-demand luxury home general contractors. Brady shares his story with us and how he’s been able to scale his business through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Resources Shared

• Fry Classic Construction
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:             Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, first show of '23. I hope you all had a happy new year and let's have a great year together. This week, we're fortunate to be meeting Brady Fry. Welcome to the show, Brady.

Brady Fry:                    Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Gordon Henry:             All right, so listeners, we've got a real entrepreneur on our hands today. Brady Fry runs Fry Classic Construction in Nashville, Tennessee, building beautiful high-end homes. He's got a full service general contracting firm, specialized in new residential construction and remodeling. They're expert builders, every home is completely customized to suit the needs and personal preferences of each client. He's got tremendous insight on what it takes to be a successful contractor, and he's going to share it with you today. What are we listening to get out of the show? What should you get out of the episode? Listen to an expert who can give you insights on what not to do, as well as what to do, particularly if you're a contractor, but really any small business. And this'll impact the jobs you've bid on, and the price you charge, and also how you manage your business.

                                   So Brady, let's get into it. Just to scroll through your website, fryclassicconstruction.com, which I did before the show, shows you definitely build beautiful homes that most people would love to live in, but I'm real interested to hear about the journey. How did you get into building beautiful homes, and how did you build your company?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah. Well, I live in Nashville, Tennessee. Like many people that came to Nashville, I came here for my love of music as a high school and young adult. I aspired to work in the music industry and did for... I attended Belmont University, which a lot of people that aspired to be in the music industry attend, and so I came here from a creative perspective. I've said it many times, Nashville is like the world series of music. All the best players from all over the world are congregating in this one area, and so it doesn't take... You could probably figure out in about an hour where you stack up with the best musicians in the world, because they're all over. They play in every bar, every church, every venue you can imagine. You don't dare pick up a guitar or a microphone in Nashville if you're not an expert musician. And so I realized pretty quick that you know what? I might have been good from where I was from, but man, when you really see yourself against the best musicians in the world, this probably is not going to be great for me.

                                   And I was pretty realistic. I wasn't a writer, a creator of music, I was just a musician. But I still had the aspiration to be in the music business. So I spent a number of years working behind the scenes, artist management and road management. And so I managed some tours, which is a big logistical nightmare. We have a bunch of semis, a bunch of lighting, sound equipment, a bunch of musicians and all of it needs to leave this city on this date, drive all night, get to another city, and set it up and perform another show at a very specific time tomorrow, so really... And I started doing that in my early 20s and it really isn't that dissimilar to building a house. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen, there are a lot of opportunities to go wrong. When they do go wrong, somebody's got to have their head together, figure out a solution quickly and move forward, because doors are opening whether you're ready or not. So really a lot of parallels between managing a tour and building a custom home.

Gordon Henry:             Wow, that's fascinating. I didn't expect that kind of answer, I never heard that. And what do you play? You play guitar?

Brady Fry:                    I play guitar, yeah. I got a couple sitting in my office.

Gordon Henry:             Okay, very cool. Well, interesting start to a career that wouldn't seem to be connected, but I guess it is. Just switching gears a little bit. So Nashville, and in addition to being an amazing country music place, I don't know if it's foresight or luck, but it's also one of the hottest markets in the country for construction and just general growth. I mean, the place is really on fire.

Brady Fry:                    It's been a rocket ship really in the 30 years that I've been here. The last 10 years particularly, it's been hot. Again, I fell in love with it for its music and its culture. I think what makes it a little bit more interesting, maybe we're similar populations to other metropolitan areas, but I think that the roots that we have in music and Southern culture, which maybe make us cooler than Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte Clark, North Carolina is a great city, it's big, I don't know if it's particularly cool. And so we have some of those cool cultural and musical identity that's here. I think you're exactly right. When people ask me what are the keys to my success, I think I have some personal attributes that are helpful, but I could have those same attributes, and if I was in Decatur, Illinois, I wouldn't be having the same career experience, because there wouldn't be a big demand for things that I'm good at.

                                   So I didn't pick Nashville because construction was on fire and I didn't pick construction because Nashville was on fire. Both of those things led themselves to attributes of my interest and my ability, and I got very fortunate that things that I had a ability at was in a market where there's just been increasing demand.

Gordon Henry:             So let's turn a little bit to Brady Fried Construction, just give us some metrics. How big is your company? How long you've been around? How many jobs a year do you do? How many employees you have?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah, really... I guess probably post 2015 is when I started consistently getting more opportunities and particularly... Well, maybe this is even to a lesson to some people that think it's all going to happen quicker. I didn't really start getting a real consistent demand for these fine homes until about three and a half years ago. That first pipeline you get, you go, "Man, is this pipeline the culmination of 10 years of effort, and I'm going to work through this big pipeline and then it'll be empty? Or is my business going to be known as the person that produces this quality of work and we'll always be able to fill this pipeline?" And so the business got dramatically more... Even though I've been in it 20 years, sophisticated just three years ago. And so now we run 13 to 15 employees, we have some guys on our maintenance team, and those guys come and go. We'll probably add a couple of more staff positions this year.

                                   Last few years, we've done about $15 million a year in revenue, we'll probably be just north of 20 next year. But we believe with the staff that we have in place, and the sales that we have, that we can produce about $30 million a year in revenue with our current team, pretty much how it is, so...

Gordon Henry:             How many jobs a year? You say $15 million in revenue, is that average home a million dollars? Is it 15 homes? How many homes equal $15 million?

Brady Fry:                    Well, it's interesting because I remember the first time I got a $3 million job, I was delighted and that would be a small job for us. Most of the stuff that we get now, our average job's probably 7 or $8 million, up to $15 million. So we usually have about six active jobs. We have three project managers right now. One of our commitments as a company is we'll never have a project manager that's doing more than two projects. And sometimes they only have one, based on scope of the project and the timing, and they're usually in different phases, so we're usually on the back end of a project and starting. We wouldn't put a project manager where they have two starts or two finishes at the same time. There's a curved construction, and so if you can space those out, there's different phases of construction that require a little less bandwidth from the project manager.

                                   And so they can be really intense, closing out another job. Another job might be getting framed, that takes two months to frame it, and they don't have to be hovering every second of the day for that task to happen.

Gordon Henry:             So that's a pretty sophisticated operation. And I'm wondering as you've grown, as you've scaled the business, just how you've successfully scaled it. And particularly, we're always interested on the show in the systems, the technology. We'll get to social media and that stuff in a minute, but I'm talking more your back office. Are there systems you've put in place to enable you to grow this business and manage it without things getting chaotic?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah, I think that's always the challenge of the entrepreneur, you're always looking to do that. I'll address your question two different ways. The business is very much a part of me. I mean, I built it mostly as a solo entrepreneur. I am a builder. I consider myself a builder first, not a businessman. I didn't look at spreadsheets and rates of return, and go,. "Man, I'm going to go into construction." So I look at things from a trade perspective. So in terms of how we produce our product, it's very personal to me. Even among our project manager team, it's got to look like I did it myself. And I tell everybody, "I will go back to building on myself to maintain this quality, but if I do, we don't need 15 people." So from in terms of what the expectation is on the final product, it's very personal to me and it's very much my fingerprints on how things look, what our quality standards are. Now, when you talk about operation, and technology and systems, I'm different. I'm more of a big picture guy on that sort of thing.

                                   And so as you start building your business, and you realize people have other aptitudes, you now have a full-time estimating and purchasing department. Two talented young women that are way more capable of going through really detailed specifications line by line, by line, by line, by line, and confirming those. With the supply chain we have now, if there's a mistake, the reconciliation might be 20 weeks away, so the stakes are very high, it's not really my amplitude. And so we're using some technologies. We use a construction management tool, CoConstruct, which is one of the nationally distributed marketing products, but what I'll say... So we're using that product, but I didn't even onboard the product. As a business owner, I don't think I would've been that effective at onboarding the product, so I want two of my employees that are better at that thing. I said, "Hey. First of all, you assess this technology. Do you think this is a technology to be valuable?" "Yes." "Okay. Would you be in charge of onboarding the product?"

                                   So if it was up to me, attending all the education seminar, going through the frequently asked questions, not a chance it would happen, not a chance. But because I've empowered people that are more in their amplitude, it's working out better. So what I understand, the biggest things that improve our business, some of them are my ideas, some of them aren't, but rarely am I the person that actually implements it, even if it's my idea. And many times it's not my idea.

Gordon Henry:             We know you're active on social media. I checked out your Instagram post. It's interesting that a person in your business, and you being the boss, is interested in that, but you are, why?

Brady Fry:                    Well, I just want to be in the conversation. I enjoy consuming social media, I don't love contributing to social media. The thing that I think is really different about the time we're living in, both as a market being Nashville and technology at large in the world we're living in, as Nashville's become more people moving in, there's more technology. There's more ways to broadcast to your audience, and to tell your story, and to communicate what problems you solve. I said, "Wait a minute, I don't think this old paradigm really works. And I think if I just assume because I've traditionally been in the conversation for the really good jobs, that I'm always going to be in the conversation, I might be wrong. And I don't want to find out when my phone hasn't rang for a year that that's true. And I don't want some 35-year-old builder, who's doing a good job of communicating their value proposition, showing what problems they solved to start taking my work." So that's just how I perceived it. Some people really love it, I don't love it. I don't consider myself a influencer, I'm a builder.

                                   I'm not out trying to cut brand deals, or be a spokesperson, or any of that. Some people in construction are really into that, "Hey man, you can get brand..." I want to be a builder, that's what I love doing. And so I want to keep building a builder. So I'll participate in social media and other forms of getting our message out to that end, so...

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, that's great. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about bidding on jobs and pricing. I wonder if you have recommendations on bidding. How do you do it? And how do you recommend people in the trade do it? And are there some classic things that people do wrong?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah. Well, I think the first thing that people do wrong is competitively bid anything. And I walk a lot, I've been getting in shape and have some fitness goals, and so I walk a lot. I have a lot of time to think. And I don't know, I'm an introspective person in that respect. And I thought, "What if we ordered a steak like we order professional services?" If somebody just put out a memo and said, "I would like a filet Friday night, and I'm going to buy the cheapest proposal I get," how good do you think that steak would be? It'd be terrible if the basis for winning the steak was price. But we don't buy steak that way. Somebody goes, "Hey man, if you want a really good steak in a really comfortable environment, it's 65 bucks." And so we've made this agreement when we purchase steak that we will buy a $65 steak that is tasty and prepared well in a comfortable environment, and we accept that, and we actually enjoy it.

                                   And if somebody gave us a steak that tasted like shoe leather and then we said, "What is this? This is horrible." And you said, "Yeah, that's a $9 filet." There would be no satisfaction in enjoying that steak. And so when I encourage people of any professional sales responsibility, you don't want to be considered a person who's bidding a project, you want to be presenting yourself as a professional consultant. So now I'm not bidding it, I'm in a consultant relationship. And so what I do with my customers is we could talk about some general guidelines, there's some things that we need to vet in terms of where's the project, what's your budget? Some expectations. But before they really want me to be doing any meaningful work, I have a pre-construction agreement, and that pre-construction agreement has a fee. And so immediately, we're on a one-on-one consulting relationship. And if they're just going to go out and get a bunch of proposals, there's no standardized formatting. In construction, we always get plans that have omissions, errors, lack of information. There's no standard bidding document. It's not even relative in what we do.

                                   Having five guys look at it can almost tell you nothing meaningful. And so we say, "Let's enter a consulting relationship." We don't have an agenda, but we want to provide a professional service, help you make educated decisions to arrive at a price. Not just take bad plans with little or no information, attach a price to it, hope that we set a price that was lower than anybody else's and then you decide to hire us. It's just a bad way to get a job, and what I have found is the best clients... It's funny, these young builders, they've heard me speak on this subject before, and they'll call me and go, "I can't do that in my market." And I say, "If nobody's doing your market, what an easy way to differentiate yourself." Even better if nobody's charging for consulting services, even better. And the best clients immediately realize the value. I spend so little time trying to justify it, and everybody thinks that I have some persuasive poetic way of selling it, I don't. I bring it up, the best clients are usually writing me a check before I finish the sentence, so...

                                   But it's been the most powerful things. Qualifying your customers better, attaching some stakes that verify their commitment to you. And I'll liken it to this. I don't know what kind of vehicle you drive, but if you take a car to an autobody shop, there's an assessment fee. You're not required to replace your transmission, but they don't pull your engine, get a guy underneath there on a dolly on his back for three hours to tell you how much it is, and then do you go take it somewhere else to get fixed. That person's getting paid to assess what your needs are and to prescribe a formula for you, construction should be the same way. I think that that process of attaching an agreement, a fee, some expectations, make sure that both people are on the path towards an actual project. They're just not out tire kicking and fight shopping, so...

Gordon Henry:             I want to touch on a subject that I think is near and dear to your heart, which is hiring, and hiring your workforce and the talent that you need to do what you do. Is it a challenge for you to hire people, find people?

Brady Fry:                    Yes, but I will say... So a couple things. I mean, yes, but I think the key to it is you got to live in a recruiting mindset. If you meet somebody who's really sharp, you might not have a position for them right now, but there's people that I've had relationships with years before they came to work for me. They didn't need a job and I didn't have a job. So I think it's business owners... I feel like I recognize talented people, I just feel like I see that person and I go, "Wow, this person is sharp. Man, I'd love to find a place for them." And so I just think that if you are not looking for talent until you need talent, you're always going to be behind. If you're always looking for talent and you love talent, you're never behind. Because I usually have four or five people that I'm going, "Man, I can't wait till I have a spot. I'm going to call that person up." So I think you just have to have that recruiting mindset. And I have it because I enjoy people and I enjoy talented people.

                                   And so when I meet people that I impress me, I remember it, I stay in touch with them, I can't wait to get an opportunity where I get to call and go, "Hey, where are you at in your life? You're willing to think about a move? Man, we got a spot." And I don't have any formal training in recruiting or hiring practices. Probably some of my practices are anti what the traditional business world would tell you, but it's just how I work. I trust my gut pretty implicitly.

Gordon Henry:             So you have a philosophy about how to run the business in a way that you think is going to make it work, not just for you personally, but also make it attractive for the employees, right?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah. I say all the time, I work to live, I don't live to work. I enjoy my work, don't mistake... I don't do this just to fund other things, but this isn't my life. I have three children that I love, I want to be at every... Well now they're young adults, so they need me less, but if they're out of school, I want to be with them. I want to travel, I want to have great experiences, and so that's not just for me, my employees aren't here just to fund my dreams. I want this business to fund their dreams as well. One thing I really admire about Gary Keller, who was the visionary and the namesake of Keller Williams Realty, is Gary said, "Hey man, I want to be like a Mac computer, and I'll be in this platform, and then other people can bring things. And man, this thing can just grow and they can realize their dreams and ambitions inside of what I'm doing, and they feel like, "Hey, I can just grow here," instead of going, "Man, I outgrew Brady, now I have to leave.""

                                   And so I say it, I believe it. I've had employees say, "Man, I'm going to have to work on this on Saturday." I go, "We'll get to it Monday. Let's just do it Monday, recharge over the weekend." And so I think it's a little bit less typical in construction, because we're used to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And what I've encouraged my peers in the construction industry to realize, we're in a competition now for talent. And construction traditionally, a lot of people that are in construction ended up here, particularly in the labor force. They didn't choose to be a painter or a trades person, they've got DUIs, or recovering drug addicts, or criminal records. They're not appealing to the traditional business market. Now we're saying, "We want appeal to people, we want this to be their first choice." Well, if this is going to be their first choice, we have to compete with other industries, and have vacation time, and sick days, and benefits.

                                   Those things haven't traditionally been available in a residential... Some big commercial outfits, but that's been almost unheard of in residential construction. And I think if these people want to solve the labor gap and hire the best talent, they're going to have to compete with the other industries for those prospects.

Gordon Henry:             Just in the last few minutes we have, I wanted to ask you a couple more personal questions. First of all, do you have any mentors... Have been critical to your development along the way?

Brady Fry:                    Well, it's interesting. I don't have that formal... It's interesting because I'm a mentor for other people. They've called me and said, "Will you mentor me?" And I say yes. And I say, "Hey, congratulations for you. Maybe I was too insecure to make that phone call when I was your age and I wish I had, because I think the person who is the mentor enjoys it." I enjoy it. I love hearing from these young people and helping them solve some problems. So I don't have that formal one person that I have coffee with once a month, or that I pick up the phone and call, but there are people that are... One of the things I've tried to say to these younger builders that I try to help, "We want somebody to hand us the picture of what it takes to do it, but it's not really a picture, it's a puzzle." And what I do is you get all this information from podcasts, from YouTube, from professional organizations, and you have to see which ones really apply to you and which pieces that you think you can implement.

                                   So more than having a specific mentor, I go, "Hey, Michael Stone, who wrote a book 20 years ago, Markup & Profit: A Contractor's Guide, was instrumental in breaking the paradigm that there's one price, that's what we get paid, and we all have to make our businesses operate in this price that somebody invented. We don't even know where it came from." Very fundamental on how I built a business. I said, "Hey, I think I can actually be charging more in some circumstances," or, "We don't just take an arbitrary fee that somebody else imposed on us." So Michael was very important in breaking that paradigm. There's a consultant who's a friend of mine, Shawn Van Dyke. Shawn did some consulting for me and Shawn broke the paradigm...

                                   We try to be everybody's friend and he goes, "Hey, Brady, your job right now is to sell. You might be a consultant... Stop consulting, you have to sell. When they hire you, you can be a consultant, but right now, it's okay to use some sales techniques to close deals. You don't have to give away endless amounts of valuable information to build trust and hopefully in a month sell, because if you don't sell, it's going to be negative for your family and your employees, so you must sell." So he was really fundamental in that. Brad Leavitt, who's a peer of mine, Brad's probably 10 years younger than me, but Brad, one of the big things that I guess Brad inspired me about is I go, "Wait a minute, I think I can build this business a lot bigger than I thought." I had to see somebody go, "Well, maybe I could build more than two houses, and maybe I could have more employees, and maybe you can't scale construction business."

                                   I didn't even realize that was possible until Instagram, because I just wasn't watching what was happening in my industry nationally, I was just watching the guys that were 10 years older than me and going, "Well, can I get where they got in the next 10 years?" Instead of going, "Well, why are they limiting what my belief is?" Andrew Patterson has an $80 million a year construction business, maybe I could be an $80 million construction year business. And Brad Leavitt's at $30 million. So Brad is really... We've gotten to be good friends, but Brad was the person that gave me that puzzle piece of, "Hey, wait. Maybe the opportunity's way bigger than what you thought it was." And Brad's a smart guy in a good market, but guess what? You're a smart guy in a good market, so maybe you should be dreaming a little bigger than you've been dreaming previously. So those are a few of the guys, but I wish I had the confidence and courage, and any young people that listen your podcast, pick up the phone... Listen, call somebody you admire, they'll probably agree to mentor you.

                                   If they don't, that's probably more a reflection on them than it is on you, don't get discouraged. If it takes you a couple phone calls to find that person that's got the right heart, pick up the phone call. It's one of the things I regret. I looked at it as, "What's in it for them? Why would they mentor me? They know everything and I know nothing," and I didn't have my head straight. So yeah, pick up the phone and find a mentor. I wish I had.

Gordon Henry:             Well, that's a great way to end the show and very inspiring words. And I think it's really true, and I hope some people will take that to heart. So Brady, just to finish this off, where can people learn more about you and what you're doing?

Brady Fry:                    Yeah, check me out on Instagram, Fry Classic Construction. I post some information videos, we show some of our work. I also have a website fryclassicconstruction.com. Brady@fryclassicconstructions.com is my email address. And people reach out to me regularly. I do get a fair amount of people reach out, but not so many that I can't stay in touch, so I've made a lot of friends through Instagram, social media podcast, and yeah. So if something I've had is a problem you're trying to solve, feel free to reach out to me. I'd be happy to correspond with you.

Gordon Henry:             Fantastic. Well, Brady, I want to thank you again for coming on our show. It's been great to have you here.

Brady Fry:                    Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:             And I want to thank our producer Tim Alleman, our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe. And please leave us a five-star review, we'd really appreciate it, it helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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