How this Nevada Stair Builder Recruits & Retains his 25 Person Team

Audio Transcription

Mark Lamberth
Hey there, and welcome to another episode of The Contractor Grow Show. My name is Mark Lamberth, your host, and today I have Allen Morgan here on the show from Nevada Stairs in Las Vegas. Thank you for being here, Alan. Thanks for being on the show.

Allen Morgan
Yeah, no problem. Very interested in what you’d like to talk about. It’ll be fun.

Mark Lamberth
Cool. Yeah. Well, I’ve learned a lot more about your story here, but maybe you can just give us the breakdown what you guys are up to over at Nevada Stairs in Las Vegas.

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Allen Morgan
Well, I mean, the story is basically the majority owner of our company’s named Peter Ner, and he started a company with a gentleman back in 1994 named Russ Emrich, and they were actually installers for a company called Artistic Stairs that came out of Arizona. And what’s interesting is Artistic stairs started out with Arizona, came into Las Vegas and the funny story is, it’s kind of long, but the guy that owns Titan Stairs originally, which is a really big company here in town, they’re a good company, they’ve been sold a few times, but the original owner came from artistic stairs too. So there’s a lot of people that came from this company called Artistic Stairs. Yeah, so Pete left with Russ and they started in Nevada stairs back in the 90, about 94 Bill Burke with another guy named Kendall Sby who started Titan Stairs back probably about the same time, or before I get my dates wrong, so don’t quote me on it had Titan stairs and I actually met Bill Burke who owned Titan Stairs through my family, who owns roller skating rinks for 50 plus years.

Allen Morgan
Oh, no kidding. Okay.

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Allen Morgan
Yeah, we actually got into a hockey fight. He’s a goaltender and as a player and next thing you know he’s playing hockey at the family rink and sponsoring hockey teams with my dad and I, and next thing you know, I’m coaching hockey for him and then next thing you know he’s asking me to come work for the stair business. It felt like it was a great career for me to move. My dad was going to sell a skating rink and I got to get a real life job eventually one day. So luckily he hired me and 25 years later there’s this huge story about me being at Titan Stairs, leaving the Nevada stairs for a couple years, recession hit, lost my job, went back to Titan Stairs for a little while. Pete had unfortunately had his first wife he lost due to health issues and he’s, I’m 50, so he’s like in mid sixties and he wanted to need some help and look and have an exit strategy to retire out of the business.

Allen Morgan
So I was the next best thing. I had experience with him, and I’ve been doing this since 1999 and my wife, who’s actually a licensed general contractor by trade, who’s been building homes in Las Vegas for 25, 20 or even 30 years, whatever it is, he thought that we’d be a great combination to bring back into his company and we’ve been partners with him. Basically we’re managing partners, we run the whole business, me and my wife Tina, and he’s kind of on a semi-retirement program where we’re trying to exit him out to his cabin in Utah and we run the business full time. So it’s kind of our baby basically in a nutshell, which is kind of a really good family run business even though we’re not blood family.

Allen Morgan
So

Allen Morgan
That’s our business and we’ve grown a lot over the years and we specialize in mostly residential construction. We do a lot of builders in town. I don’t do all of them, but I do most of them and most of my other business, you’d be surprised it’s extra remodels where we remodel the staircases for people living in existing homes. They’ve been Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, so if people have been in homes for 20, 30 years, they don’t want to upgrade their home, they can’t afford the new price ranges of homes or the interest rate’s too high, they’re like, honey, let’s just renovate our flooring, our cabinets, and by the way, let’s do our stairs. It becomes a domino effect. And so there’s two of us that do what we do here in Vegas. And so we renovate about 175 to 200 stairs a year in existing living homes.

Allen Morgan
Wow. Amazing.

Allen Morgan
And not excluding our other business, which is our existing track homes, which is brand new built homes for residential. So we stay very busy with about 12 installers, four finished crews, and we’re probably running about 25 to 30 give or take employees at any moment.

Mark Lamberth
Interesting. Wow. No kidding. Okay.

Allen Morgan
Yeah.

Mark Lamberth
Great. So you guys, serious operation, I mean you guys have been around forever. I saw just a quick summary on your site. Nevada Stairs is the longest, I think, longest locally owned, licensed and bond stair company in Vegas from banisters, treads, railings, handrails and ballast trades. We’ll design, manufacture and create the custom staircase of your dreams.

Allen Morgan
Yeah, we could update our website. It’s a little dated, but we’re going to try to get an update for next year, but we got so much more we’ve done that we just haven’t put up there, which is kind of sad because we have a lot of beautiful stairs that we haven’t put on their website that’s really missing, but

Mark Lamberth
Interesting. I’ll bet. I mean, I took a look at your photos. I mean it’s interesting kind of process you guys have. So I mean it’s sort of like their custom stairs yet people can sort of choose a general style, they can choose the wood. I mean, how does the design process happen with you guys? So basically

Allen Morgan
What we do basically is I get a phone call or an email. And the funny part is I’ve done this for 25 years. I could usually look up somebody’s address and not to be snooping on people, but I could find out where they live or find the neighborhood, find the square footage of the house sometimes and go, oh, I’ve done that plan before between me and my wife. We’ll figure out the house and go, alright, I know this client before I even call ’em and I’ll actually already get the game plan going with looking at old pricing I’ve done at a house and I’ll have a game plan before they even know what they’re looking for or before I even know what they’re going to me they want. I like to be in there before the game starts because I feel like if I’m the first guy that sets the rules, I can dictate everything, even if I’m wrong, they’re going to believe everything that I say and it’s going to make them have a more warm and fuzzy feeling with my company. And so a lot of times we go out, I can do it off of the website or I schedule to come out to them in person. I go over with a picture book, I drop the staircases, show them what their options are. I come back, I bid all my jobs same day, you will never get a bid tomorrow, chase me down, it’s the same day. Even if I’m out of town, I’ll,

Allen Morgan
I’ll bid it out of town even on hunting trips, I’ll have a laps top of a trailer and I’ll bid it there or I’ll find a way to get bid same day. And then once you sign with me, my wife meets with them with a big old toolbox. She walks in with pieces, parts, wood samples because bid several wood options for the client because they’re wanting to pick a color. And a lot of times I feel like if I could save them five or 10% just on the color by using a softer wood for instance, it’s not a cheaper wood, it’s just more an economical wood. And if we’re not walking on it, then obviously using poplar wood over maple is going to save you 10, 15%. Well, you can’t put that on a stair tear because you’re walking on it, but if it’s a handrail or a post and you’re going to go with an ebony finish, which is a black finish, why spend the money?

Allen Morgan
Any wood can be dinged with a ring or whatever. So she walks in there, pieces, parts, walks ’em through, it has tons of colors for the pick, she takes the colors and she puts something against the wall, the flooring, so they could see how it coincides with everything in their home. And the funny part is a lot of times their idea of what they want doesn’t match what they want in their home because when you put that color into their home, it’s specialized in their own home. It’s all custom because your house is different than my house is so on. Even if your neighbor has the same staircase, it could look different. So we spend about an hour or two hours with our clients once we move forward with them. I don’t make ’em sign any paperwork or a deposit until they actually meet with Tina because I want them to have a hundred percent comfortability of what product we’re selling them, what they’re getting and all that.

Allen Morgan
I hate when people send me over a signed contract, send me a deposit, and we haven’t met to go over color selections dates on and it felt like you’re just taking advantage of your clientele. And I’m not trying to beat up subcontractors, but most subcontractors in our day are blow and go and I probably lose work by being too honest and because I want to be cross t’s and dot i’s. I’ve actually had clients, I’ve been in their homes and they’re just trying to rush the system and I’ve had to honestly say, look, I really appreciate you coming in here and allowing us to be a potential contractor, but I don’t think we’re a good fit for you because you’re not letting us do our job to our ability. We are the professionals in what we do. Are we perfect? No, we’re also but not perfect is what my wife’s motto is for our company.

Allen Morgan
And so we stick to that and yes, we have mistakes, don’t get me wrong, but we fix our mistakes when we do have them because everybody has ’em. We don’t run from them. We take accountability, but we want you to feel comfortable with what you’re doing with us, whether it’s good or a situation that disappoints you and we can make it good for you. Most of our reviews, we have 50, 60 reviews and we have over four and a half, four or three quarter stars because we do a good job with our clients, but we are not perfect.

Mark Lamberth
Yes, and I noticed your reviews. I mean they’re exceptional. We talk with a lot of companies at different levels. A lot of companies don’t have reviews at all. And so when I see a company that’s got 50, 60 reviews like you guys do, that says a lot to begin with. And I mean it’s not only the star rating, I mean the quality of the reviews as well because people get in and they describe what their experience has been. I want to ask you about that, and you’ve already talked about this, but I’m just talking about the kind of level of quality of service. You guys clearly are setting a really high bar. I mean with contractors, as you say, a lot of blow and go for different reasons. People can get flamed out online and have bad reviews and whatever. You guys look great. I mean, what’s your secret sauce? What’s your magic around delivering such consistent work over so many years that’s so high quality that people are just kind of raving about your work?

Allen Morgan
Well, the biggest quality, the biggest thing that we do that most people do not do in any business you do no matter what you’re selling is answering your phone, answering the phone basically. See, one thing that we do is my wife and I, we give out our cell numbers to all of our clientele.

Allen Morgan
Right? Got it.

Allen Morgan
I love it. Unfortunately, our phones sit by our beds twenty four seven when we’re at home, no matter where we’re at, we answer our calls and text messages. I’ve had text messages and emails I’ve answered at 2, 3, 4 in the morning. Not that I recommend doing that all the time, but we like to be the first on everything. If there’s an issue with somebody, we call ’em, we don’t have problems in our car, we have challenges, we have solutions. So if there’s a solution, I mean the challenge that we have, we try to have a solution immediately we call, we don’t hide end of the day, been chasing us for six hours. That client’s going to be so frustrated, been chasing you, we cut that off before the situation gets out of hand because we are in construction, there’s no perfection unfortunately. And I’m not trying to set the bars that we do terrible work and we’re always putting out fires. That’s not the issue. It’s about the way you handle all the client’s concerns

Allen Morgan
And we handle ’em as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ve relayed that information to our girls in the office, our production team, everybody that we have working for us to know that if you’ve got an issue, you handle it immediately. If you can’t call ’em, Hey, I heard you your challenge, let me find out and get an answer to, I will call you right back. And you do that, don’t just hide and make people chase you down. Almost everybody I talk to in any construction business and even almost any other business, I mean I play hockey, I play tennis, I hunt, I do all these things and all these business I spend money with, I’m always chasing people down. And it’s the most frustrating thing. And if you’ve got to chase somebody down to give them money, they’re probably not somebody you want to do business with.

Allen Morgan
To me, it just means you’re not working efficiently and you’re constantly putting out fires. But we’re always trying to think above and also ahead of everybody else to make sure that we can foresee everything out there. Our expectations, paperwork that we sent out with our proposals is probably five or six pages long and I tell people, listen, this is not to scare you. This is to educate you. Because I hate when someone goes, well, you never told me this. You never told me that. No, no, no, no. We tell you everything that we can think of. However, every year my dad and I have a joke running joke, January 1st, Alan, how dumb were you last year? I was dumb as can be, but right now I’m still of genius up until December 31st because what I’ve learned is everybody seems to find another question that I haven’t thought about every year off of Google or whatever YouTube that they found.

Allen Morgan
And it happens. That’s just the way people are. We all think we’re all made differently. And so we’re constantly trying to fix our expectations of our clients to take ’em to different levels every year because every year we realized the year before how dumb we really were. Even though we had a good year or not, we were idiots. So we’re trying to better ourselves every year so we don’t live in a glass bubble and think every Wednesday meeting we have a management meeting and think we’re just geniuses. We actually really look at situations and say, look, okay, this client was very difficult. And most people say, well, that guy was just a jerk, or lady was a jerk. And they blame them a hundred percent. And sometimes I understand that those issues are, I hate to just blame a client, but I always at my people in my company say, hold on, stop for a second.

Allen Morgan
They’re a hundred percent wrong, but I want you to look at something where could we have recognized their misunderstanding and have a different avenue to foresee these type of telltale signs for clientele so that we can better ourselves and help these clients that don’t see things as well as we assume they see, even though they sign the paperwork, they do forget some things. It’s very overwhelming. You just can’t go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and look up stair parts and you came with flooring cabinets and we’re just kind of in those weird dinosaur type businesses where you don’t see us, you don’t know what we are, we just sneak in and it just gets put up in the house. I mean it’s different. So most people don’t even know there’s such thing as their companies. I didn’t know the first time my parents bought a house that I thought when you bought from the builder, they built it. I didn’t know you had 10, 12, 15 different contractors doing all the subcontractor work. I had no idea.

Allen Morgan
And all the steps of putting a house together. So with stairs, it can be an overwhelming situation. There’s a lot of options, there’s a lot of geometry that goes involved in that, a lot of trigonometry. So it is hard to find good people in our industry. And so we try to just try to find the people who are the most patient and calm demeanor of them and we figure we can teach them the business afterwards so that it can rub off to our clientele because our clientele, we have to teach them from the bottom up. It’s a very tricky business.

Mark Lamberth
That’s interesting. And you actually leading into something I’d love to learn more about because I think you guys have got this figured out. So some of the photos on your site sounds like they’re kind of dated. You had

Allen Morgan
Very dated

Mark Lamberth
20 plus people on the team then. So I think it’s 25 now. A lot of our listeners, people in the trades these days, remodelers builders, I mean they really struggle landscape. I mean everyone really in the skilled trades and local service area, businesses have trouble finding training motivating and retaining team. And you guys have been at this for a long time. I get the sense that you guys have built a cool culture and I may have some other questions about just your mindset. I think that I got some cool stuff figured out there as well. But regarding team and retention, I mean what kind of tips do you have around finding recruiting, motivating and retaining a team? People long-term

Allen Morgan
A really tough thing because what happens is this, like I said, the stair business, we’re dinosaurs because you don’t have somebody every day just picking up from anywhere to just pick up and do tools because you need a thousand dollars worth of tools minimum. And I mean thousands, like two, 3000, whatever. And to jump in our industry just to start building, it takes a lot of patience and you really need somebody young to learn the business that doesn’t have a lot of bills. You don’t want somebody who has, is 40 something years old, has a wife, two kids trying to put ’em through whatever they’re dealing with sports and just going to walk into our industry and make 60, 70, $80,000 a year. It just doesn’t work that way. You really need to find ’em when they’re young or you get lucky and they quit from another company here town, which you don’t like that because you don’t like to be stealing back and forth from people.

Allen Morgan
You don’t want the have some loyalty and we all know each other in the business and we don’t like to steal from each other. But if somebody comes over and I’m not going to say no either, just like they would not say no and I can’t blame them now we don’t go on a lot. We don’t go onto job sites and try to steal people. We don’t do that and they don’t either, which is nice. But the one thing that my wife has been really good at is, so my wife’s background is everything you could think of in building homes from sales and marketing, purchasing to building homes herself. She’s built probably close to a thousand homes in Las Vegas, anywhere from a startup home to a 10 million custom home. She’s got two college degrees, she’s got contractor’s license, she’s on three boards, not including our homeowners association of course, but she’s in women’s and professional building.

Allen Morgan
She’s in the Southern Nevada Homeowners Association. And she also is one of the co-founders in what you’re talking about is a trade school here in Las Vegas who she spent three years with everybody building a trade school and she was a school teacher for seven years. So the trade school was great because she had the knowledge of school teaching and she had it also from the construction industry. Richard, nobody has that, but she does. And they built this school and I think they’re in their second year now. And what the great thing about we’re trying to do is we’ve been trying to teach people carpentry, all the different trades that you could think of so they can have a career out of high school because that’s the basic way to get anybody. Because if you’re trying to get somebody who has an established life, they can’t go backwards to make $150 a day.

Allen Morgan
It just doesn’t work. And with inflation and the way a cost of living always goes up in different states, it’s just so hard to do. So she has spent so much time over the last two or three years or longer now building the school and I think it’s in a second year now, and they’ve got five or six people on board with different subcontractors and they have a school, they have a freshman and sophomore class now. I don’t think they’ve got a junior or senior yet because where are you at junior’s now? Well, I got junior’s. My apologies. I’m behind. There’s so much she does. I can’t keep up with her. Luckily we’ve been married for a long time and I can have that relationship where she doesn’t always need me or vice versa. Yeah, I need her more. She needs me obviously. But yeah, I’ll bet. I definitely married up, not down. Yeah, I

Mark Lamberth
Love it

Allen Morgan
Thing, but that’s the thing that we do. And so Tina basically has helped with our industry and just construction in general, not just the stairs where her and her team have built this school from the ground up. Literally they had to get grants. I mean they spent years doing this. They don’t make any money out of this. This is a

Mark Lamberth
Trade school, woodworking school for apprenticeships essentially.

Allen Morgan
Yeah, they have basically high school and they learn their regular general school education plus along types of different careers when different types of trades in constriction industry because college isn’t for everybody.

Allen Morgan
Sure.

Allen Morgan
I mean I played every sport you could think of and I had a junior college golf scholarship. I didn’t last three months in college, then I came back and was running the skating rink for my dad and playing professional roller hockey and I had no education and I got lucky to fall into this trade and I was very fortunate. But I mean you go into college, college isn’t for everybody. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I like college. I got son have one son that has two associate degrees. I have another son that’s in the Marine Corps in Japan and he’s got college degrees. I’m the dumbest in the whole family. I mean it really is. But what we’ve learned is for me, and I’ve always said this, I think you should go get a college degree personally for a backup plan if you can because it’s great.

Allen Morgan
But to me, you got to go to college, you need to go there for, I always make the old joke for a lawyer doctor or something you specialize in, but most people come out of college and they got nowhere to go and they end up, some people work great with their hands, some people work good with selling and I sell stairs for a living. I sell a lot of stairs. I can’t do what they can from the neck down. That’s just not my industry. But this school helps with finding these kids so they can either go out of the school to college or find a trade out of that and get right into the workforce.

Mark Lamberth
Interesting. So regarding finding folks to be on your team, especially for a trade that’s got, maybe it’s kind of got a classic apprenticeship type thing. I mean this isn’t necessarily at the very top maybe income range of the trades. Sounds like that’s maybe how you find folks is find them young and train them up. How do you retain them? So if someone’s been with you for five years, maybe now they are in their late thirties, whatever, they’ve got their second kid on the way, what do you do to create a culture so that people stay long-term? Because ultimately, I mean businesses we’re looking for profitability obviously amongst other things. Well, especially for an apprenticeship type employee, I mean it might not really be profitable for you even for years. So once you get into that zone where someone’s been working with you for five years or so, they know your systems, they can run the shop on their own, whatever. How do you keep them?

Allen Morgan
Well, the one thing that we do a lot differently in a lot of places, so in the service you have stair installers and you have stair finishers. So you have guys that stay in the railing system so they can make money. I have some guys that can make three, 400 bucks a day or even more. Oh, okay, great. But you’ve got to be at the point where you have to be willing to learn too. I have some guys that just don’t want to learn square iron, horizontal designs, curve and twist, don’t want to do finish. And that’s where the money’s at is the custom stuff. They want to stick to the square pickets, which is what we call mission or traditional, which is a turning and you make a few hundred bucks and they want to work in the track business where there’s very low margins for the subcontractor.

Allen Morgan
So we can’t put higher piece rates in there because we got to be competitive to keep light bulb work on is what I call it. And some of those guys don’t mind making 1 50, 200 bucks a day and I don’t know how they survive. I guess they’ve got a good spouse at home that makes good money and they can make it work and God bless ’em. But we tell guys, if you want to make money in our business, you have to learn to do the hiring stuff. I have a very high-end guy that’s probably got 30, 35 years of experience that built a lot of the high-end stuff that you see on the website. I took him out of out of the field from doing stairs and he’s actually my production manager for the custom homes. And so he helps teach some of these guys. He gets ’em involved if they want to learn, he mentors them on job sites while they’re actually on the job to get the P rate.

Allen Morgan
He comes in and he helps them get through the job so they can learn curve and twisted stuff, meaning the stuff that spins around or bends or whatever or we do, a lot of places don’t do this, but in the East coast, if you ever look at a stair with a metal spindle, you’ll see they call little s discussions on the very bottom bottom. What they’re doing is that’s a square iron and a lot of those guys, they make a round hole and they cover up, they put a square spindle in a round hole, so they cover it up with that. We don’t, we actually make a square hole for a square spindle.

Mark Lamberth
Interesting. We

Allen Morgan
Do a round spindle, round

Mark Lamberth
Plunge router.

Allen Morgan
So they basically it’s going a morser, so we mortar sit down all that.

Allen Morgan
So our guy will teach them how to do that and we pay more on our piece rates with a square spindle than a round iron spindle. So David will walk guys through the system and get them to learn that, which is really nice. So that helps a lot. But we try to encourage the guys to learn more and we give ’em kudos and we try to make ’em feel like we’re all part of the same team. I don’t like to have titles in the business. I try to eliminate the titles as I don’t think that’s important because everybody has egos and we don’t like management, we don’t like this guy or that we just keep it all the same. We try to be family oriented. So whatever we can do to help them learn those steps and make ’em feel like they’re all part of the same team we do. We have a guy that runs our shop, really good installer. He’s not install anymore. He helps guys out. He works with them as well and helps them guide them through learning to do more difficult stuff so they can make more money. Because the more that you can learn the business, the more educated you get, the quicker you could do the job without making mistakes and make more money. We are a P rate business, so we Interesting.

Allen Morgan
Okay. Yeah, so you can make a lot more money than just 1 50, 200 bucks a day. You can get in that three, four or 500 bucks a day if you’re willing to put in the time to learn and make a few mistakes. And we’re one of those companies too that when guys make mistakes, I try not to beat ’em up and make ’em go back and fix things for free. Even they should. It costs me money, material and the labor and not putting ’em on a job, another job that they should have been on to make the money. So we try to look at the situation and say, Hey look so-and-so look, this was your fault, but this isn’t it. This is a learning experience. I’m going to at least throw you a bone or two, just kind. I don’t want you to go broke or go hungry because you were trying to learn.

Allen Morgan
I want to let them know I’m invested in them to motivate them to learn because if they make a mistake from learning and they don’t get paid, they’re not going to want to do that again. I want to spend a few bucks to teach them that because I don’t want them to not look at wanting to learn because that’s a scary thing because they make a mistake, they don’t want to ever do it again, especially if it costs of money. So you have to be very careful with that and not beat ’em up. So we are not one of those companies that a lot of construction companies, they believe in screaming and hollering and slamming and throwing stuff. I’ve seen that. However, we’re very more laid back and we realized that fighting fire with fire doesn’t ever fix anything. So we try to keep it cool with waters.

Allen Morgan
So we try to calm the situation and nobody wants to make a mistake on purpose. So we try to think more clearly and come up with resolutions to make everybody happy and realize that we all make mistakes and we want them to learn and feel like they’re always part of the growth in our business. And at the same time that they’re not in a dead end job, this is a career and they can eventually move up into management positions or if they’re looking to make more money, they need to buy a house or build that career with their family, then they’re happy with this and make it more, not as a business for anybody, but as more just a hobby for them because a lot of guys like to work with their hands and that’s a hobby. So we want them to feel that they can treat this like a hobby, have a place to go and just enjoy their day and not look as work.

Mark Lamberth
Man, that’s really cool. So the last question or two I have here, Alan, I noticed well just to talk a little bit to kind of tie this in because I think this is interesting is that Peter originally founded the business.

Speaker 4:
You

Mark Lamberth
Came in a long, long time ago. You and Tina run the company now, and Peter is not even there at the day to day. I mean you guys are really kind of running it or completely running it.

Mark Lamberth
And I saw looking at just some of your social posting and stuff, I saw that you’ve got a lot of great motivational quotes. It’s very current just as of today, last few days, whatever. But I mean you’re posting a lot. And so I’m just curious about, I mean you guys run this important business, you’re managing partner at the business. I mean you guys are completely involved and immersed in this and it sounds like you run it really well. I’m curious what the connection is to mindset. This is something that just personally you’re out posting about on social. Hey listen,

Speaker 4:
Get

Mark Lamberth
Your mind right over here. Here’s some ideas, here’s some tips about life and stuff. How is this sort of mindset piece, how has that been helpful to help you and Tina run the successful company?

Allen Morgan
Well, your mind’s a strongest part of your body and my dad always has been a great mentor for me. So I speak to my dad almost a daily basis and one thing that he’s always focused on me was the only thing that anybody, nobody can take away from you is your bond and your word. And so those are very important things to me. And so I’ve always really looked into the fact that my mindset has to be always clear and looking in positive situations. And we don’t run a perfect business. We run a very difficult business. Clientele can be very difficult and very stressful. And I’ve always told people that the situation is only as bad as you make it based on how you react to it. And so your mind has to be so much more clearer when you’re dealing these challenges. And so my wife and I, we have two boys.

Allen Morgan
My oldest son is 26 and he has Asperger’s syndrome, very, very intelligent young man. He works for a big company here in town. He has two associate degrees. My youngest is in aviation logistics in the Marine Corps and he’s in Okinawa, Japan. And we’re going to luckily get to have him back here in a few days for the holidays. And my boys, just like I did to my dad, I hope they’ve always looked up to me, I look up to my dad as guidance because if I showed them that, remember the old saying commercial, never let ’em see you sweat. Is that commercial where they do the deodorant? Oh yeah, never see sweat. So I’ve learned that from my dad. He never sweats. I’m like, that guy is just, he just, he looks calm, cool collecting no matter what’s going on. I mean, he could have just had his wallet stolen a thousand bucks.

Allen Morgan
He never would’ve known it. Know what I mean? No kidding. So I’ve always tried to live by that me and I feel like that I’ve been very lucky that because of his behavior, I’ve been fortunate to take his advice, what a concept, listen to the father. But I’ve seen that by taking his advice, things have worked out so much better for me and I’ve seen it work out for my boys as well. And Tina and I really focus on trying that with our management team and everybody that works with us. So when, if they see us with a situation when they come to us with a challenge and if I’m freaking out, what doesn’t do no good for them, they’ve got to see that everything’s okay no matter what happens that they have to know that the business is always going to be good. No matter how bad the situation is, don’t worry about it.

Allen Morgan
If Alan and Tina are not sweating it, everything’s okay then. And you have to be able to have that mindset. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong. I can sit in my truck sometimes and just want to scream to the heavens, but at the same time I have to stay calm. I can’t make a good decision if I’m not calm. I’m not saying I’m perfect. I have my moments. Please understand, I have my moments where I’m not calm and collected, but the majority of time I am because you have to be that way because somebody has to always be calm so that you can make good proper decisions in a business. And so we try to think that way. So I post a lot of things on my Facebook. I try to be smart about the politic things because obviously everybody had these last several years people have been very opinionated about politics and including myself, don’t get me wrong, sure doesn’t make it right or wrong.

Allen Morgan
I could have been just as wrong as anybody else. But at the same time, people have changed their mindsets, the way they look at things and see things. I started thinking a while back, said, you know what? I need to stop being part of the problem, start part of the solution. And so I realized I was being part of the problem sometimes with maybe posting a political view that wasn’t important anymore. I’m like, that’s just stupid, Alan. That’s just not right. And so I started thinking, you know what? Go back to the way. What got me to where I am, what got me to be a good husband, a good father for my boys and a good son, and hopefully a good business partner and a good employer. And I started going back to the things that I really like and that’s motivational speeches. I have probably on my phone about 230 daily apps.

Allen Morgan
I have albums of everything about my boys, my tennis, my hunting, my family, you name it. Even daily good things I have on that, even our dogs. I have everything. It’s crazy. I I’m going to find anything. And I just realized that stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution. And I got to start thinking more straight. I got to start leading a better for me. My wife and I are very Christian people and we’re not perfect, but we need to live more of a Christian life and that means it’s staying more positive and if it’s with God or whatever it is. So we do that positivity things. I started posting more and more and I just wanted to see, for me, it helps me out. And I thought, you know what? If it just gets to one person, I have a lot of people that follow me and mostly people that I have are friends.

Allen Morgan
They’re people that have known me for the skating rink business for 50 years. And they know me more than I know them because I don’t remember. I don’t want to be rude. I’m too good to remember because that’s not me. I put my pants on just like you do one leg at a time, man, I’m not perfect. I’m nobody. I’m just a normal guy. And if I can put something out there that just makes one person think a different way for the day, then you know what? I feel like it’s helpful and then I’m happy that I can post that. And so I post those things because it’s about keeping a clear mindset and thinking straight. And hopefully it helps people out to think well. And sometimes I’ll take those same things you see there and I may send it to on an email or a text to the team management day. I’ll send it to my boys when I see things with Sean who lives here. But Ryan is in Japan. I want to remind him, think straight.

Allen Morgan
He’s up there in the running programs up there for the computer stuff that he does. And so he’s a Lance corporal, so he’s ahead of a lot of people. So I want to keep his mind more focused on positive stuff too. And so like I said, waking up every day is tough for a lot of people and then getting through the day’s even tougher. And so I just figure if I can stay focused on keeping my day positive and my families and then if I can share some of that with other people, then I hope it works out for them. And it’s a good thing for them to be going through their struggles and maybe it helps them. It helps me every day. We run a seven day, I mean we’re five days a week, but we’re seven days. I mean, Tina, I have a funny sign over one of our things over here and it says, I don’t have a nine to five when I open my eyes to when I close my eyes. And that’s the truth. So we try to say positive as much things that we can to keep our minds in the positive, not the negatives of running a business. So that’s why it’s

Mark Lamberth
Fantastic, Alan. It’s just a lot of positivity, man. I love where you’re coming from. I really enjoyed actually reading, just going back through the last few months of stuff that you’ve written. I can tell you just got wonderful family. I know your boy are so proud of you as a dad and I’m sure they look up to you a lot and ask you for your advice a lot. And thank you so much for being on the show today. This has been fantastic. If folks want to learn more about Nevada stairs, if they want to get in touch with you personally, maybe they want to follow you, check out your Facebook where a couple of good places to find you.

Allen Morgan
I’ve been a little lackadaisical. My Nevada star Facebook and my Nevada Star Instagram, been a little lackadaisical i’s just been so busy. A lot of things. And that’s just an excuse. And I hate to tell people I take accountability for all my failures. So it’s just an excuse which we’re going to probably work on a little better next year. But our website, it does have on there, you can find stuff on there and it says, I think it’s sales@nevadaservice.com, which goes directly to our email, which goes to me, I think my wife gets in a few other people, but everything goes to me directly. I answer all the sales questions and all that. And so anything that sells@nevada.com will go to me. And then I’d always have tons of pictures on my laptop that would just blow your mind that I don’t have on the website. Go figure. And so I can always send pictures of people of other things. But I have a few things on, I think on the Facebook just running, like I said, just spend, been not accountable for adding to it. I, I think the Instagram still has a few things, but we’re working on that. But those are some areas you can still find things.

Mark Lamberth
Great. So the website’s, Nevada stairs.com, just like it sounds to get directly touch to Allen, it’d be sales at Nevada Stairs and then you can find their page on Facebook as well. Not with the most updated photos, but probably maybe some here in the next couple of months and whatnot. Perfect. Well, Alan, thanks again for taking the time. We just got in touch earlier today and you were willing and able to jump right on. It’s super helpful. It was great learning about you, Tina, the boys, the business, the story of the business. And folks, if you’re looking for some beautiful set of custom stairs for your home in Las Vegas or surrounding areas, get in touch with Alan.

Allen Morgan
Yep. That’s all you got to do. Well, I’ll get you bid probably same day. I usually do sometimes. So I’ll find a way.

Mark Lamberth
Perfect. Well thank you so much for being on the show today, man. Appreciate, it’s super helpful. Appreciate

Allen Morgan
Yeah, thank you very much. Okay, we’ll be in touch. Alright, take care. All right, have a good one. Thank you. Bye-Bye.