The Power of Values and A Supportive Workplace Community

Speaker 1 00:00:00  Welcome back to the show, everybody. I am pleased, honored, and super excited to have a fellow art brother here on the show. Jory Evans, CEO of several organizations, Evans Trucking, Evans Pro Developments, Evans HD, and I'm sure there's a lot more he has going on. But, welcome to the show, Jory. Glad to have you.
Speaker 2 00:00:20  Yeah. Thanks, Kip. It's great to be here. Yeah. Excited to hang out with you and talk business and leadership and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1 00:00:28  Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I usually try to kind of kick off the show with just talking about your origin story and just maybe just tell us about, you know, kind of comic book style. What's the origin of Jory Evans? Where do you come from and business-wise, personally, however you want to take it?
Speaker 2 00:00:44  Yeah. For sure. Well, I'm from Canada, first off. So you know, the Great White North, if you want to call it that.
Speaker 1 00:00:52  Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:00:54  You know what that's about. But, yeah. So we started. I started really young. I always joke that I finished school early because they wouldn't pay me to stay. So I dropped out of school. My dad was a truck driver, recently bought my uncle out. I had a few trucks doing the entrepreneurial business journey, and I wanted in on that action. And then I wanted to get after it. So my impatience dragged me out of that. And so I started working with him. We had five trucks at that time, and it was kind of I entered into the scene and we started working that out and, you know, learning business. My dad had had some, you know, kind of like business training. And he'd spent some time reading the book and doing that kind of thing going in. And so he really pushed me towards going that direction. And I think my first when I was 16, I started with him.
Speaker 2 00:01:49  He said, well, you're going to get your first raise when you finish this book. And he made me do a book report on How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Like one of the book, like the basic book. And it's like at the time when I was that age, I'm just like.
Speaker 1 00:02:03  Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:02:05  And you know, I'm a 16-year-old kid trying to lead and figure out how to operate in the business world with like, 50 plus year old men and like, you know, I'm a punk kid. I don't know anything. Right? And they were very clear that that was the case and that they didn't want to listen to me about that kind of stuff. So I had a really hard trajectory of learning how to lead people that are older and wiser and longer around. And so you got to win these people over. And the winning friends and influencing people is like, it's what I had to learn to do. And it was great. And so that kind of sparked me off in, going down that road of reading the books and learning about people skills and leadership and business.
Speaker 2 00:02:41  And it just it opened a whole kind of insatiable educating myself journey that I went on from there. And I've read now hundreds and hundreds of books on various topics and, and self-educated, if you want to look at it that way. So, that I have to give my dad credit for kind of starting that journey and going that direction. So fast forward, you know, however many years we're building the trucking company up. You know, I started in '07. So my second year in business with my dad was the '08 recession period. And so we just got our asses handed to us for years. You know, and I think, man, I look back as hard as it was, and I just think what a blessing it is to have grown up in that environment and to know what really hard is, and what it takes to make a business come out of the ground and survive through that kind of thing. And it was the best lessons that I could have learned was to have to build a business through massive recession and through disastrous financial terms, and to overcome in those types of situations created a kind of grit and mental toughness that's required to really be good in business in the long term.
Speaker 2 00:03:54  Right. So, you know, went through that, grew the trucking company. We probably around 20, I don't know, probably 30, 30-ish trucks, little by little up. And you know, of that over the course of ten years, you know, 5 to 30. And then it went like there were other opportunities out there. And having my dad having started this company and coming in, I just had this, like, desire to start something from myself, like, I want to do this from the beginning. So we opened up a mechanic shop. It was a vertical. We already were doing some of our own mechanic work, and I just saw a huge opportunity because everyone around us sucked. And I hated the service we were getting. And it was a real problem for us. And I was like, well, I can solve this problem for us and for everyone else around here. So I started Evans HD. Now what year would that have been? Probably around 2000.
Speaker 2 00:04:51  17, 18, something like that. I should know that. But anyway, so we started this little mechanic shop. And it's just it's, you know, had some tough years learning our way through that and how to run it and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, we grew that from one, one technician to five techs and, you know, 2 or 3 million in revenue built a new building. Four years ago now. When I moved in there with five techs, this within two years had 15 techs in that building. And then we just completed our renovations and now we have 50,000 square foot shop. And we'll be getting up 2020 plus technicians now and over $10 million in revenues in that business. And the trucking is we're just shy of 100 trucks right now. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:05:40  That new building is absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 2 00:05:42  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable. Check it out. It's. We built it. The coolest truck shop ever. So that's content of it. And then again, when we needed our first building, I was kind of like.
Speaker 2 00:05:54  I went out and visited some builders and saw it was available in our area. And I'm like, this is terrible. Like, it's just absolutely terrible. And so I went, well, we can do this better. So we started Evans Pro Development, which is a commercial construction and development company. And so we built we've built a couple of our buildings and now a couple more buildings in for various other customers. And we're growing that business as well. So, you know, that's that's the trajectory we're on. It's been a while. The, you know, to go from zero to I think we're about 150 employees now. Roughly $50 million in revenues between the three organizations. We have real estate portfolios and other things that are growing now, too. But, you know, it's been, it's been it's been wild and, it's been quite the trajectory. And I can, you know, you set vision and you set values and you grow things and go. And it just it's amazing how ten-year goals can become three-year goals when you start and you're going at it and, and you know where you're going and what you want to do, right.
Speaker 2 00:06:59  Like it just things happen. Things go, you know.
Speaker 1 00:07:04  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you've definitely. I mean, it's the typical entrepreneurial thing. Like you've you had a need personally that you saw and then you create a new business to solve that, and then you're solving other people's problems multiple times. What are some just future trends or opportunities that you're seeing now that you're most excited about, whether it's just in the business or new things out there to potentially pursue?
Speaker 2 00:07:25  Yeah, like we just went through an acquisition in January, we bought another trucking company and we're kind of bringing them in and they're, diversification. So, you know, we've been a flat deck trucking company North America wide. And, and so these this other company hauls cars mostly predominantly. So it's it's still trucking, but it's a very different type of business. And so, that that was the new thing for me that I just went through this year. And, and that is actually an opportunity, that exists in for young people in business right now is that there's so many, retirement age boomers, if you want to call them that, that are, are, you know, Gen Xers and Boomers that are looking to get out of business and there's nobody coming to buy them, right? Like there's it's 10 to 1, I think right now is the ratio of of new business owners entering to business owners leaving.
Speaker 2 00:08:17  Right. And so there's a ton of opportunity I get I get approached. 3 to 5 times a month. Hey, are you interested in buying your business?
Speaker 1 00:08:25  Really? Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:08:27  It's wild, and there's great opportunities to do that. So people who are in the entrepreneurial vein, who are excited and hard driving and want to do business, like you can start a business from the ground up. And that's a great thing to do and to, to learn from, really. But you can speed your process up so much by by buying an existing business and growing it from there. Because again, I super recommend Cody Sanchez if you don't follow her online. She's very vain in talking about that and have the statistics and and how to do it and all that kind of thing better than I could ever say it. But I think the great opportunity for young entrepreneurs is, is the swallowing up of existing businesses and the massive growth and improvement that exists there. where the other thing I'll say is that in the transportation industry and in our economy right now, we're kind of in a really weird recession period, especially in the transportation.
Speaker 2 00:09:21  It's one of the hardest seasons we've had probably since '08. And trucking transportation is on like a four-year cycle. So every four years we tend to have a bit of a downturn. This is a pretty heavy one. So, AI that used to hurt us a lot more in that cycle year. But this year it's become a big opportunity because with our growth and our progress that we've made, downturns become opportunities because strong one there, it kills. It kills everyone else out of the way. And then when things turn around, you gain this market share. And when looking back over the last 18 years, our biggest gains and biggest growth and biggest profits have been post downturn years. And so now, instead of just trying to survive the downturn year, now we're preparing to take over. The market should be available to us in the coming in the following years. Instead of looking months ahead. We started looking years ahead and and it's made us play a different game, which is it's a it's a great opportunity.
Speaker 2 00:10:22  It takes maturity