These are low end jeans or something like that. Or low end pants. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Blake Underhill: 09:36
It’s Sears and Roebuck. Low end, you know, one pair. You know, 90 to 100. Not 100%, but 90% of my clothing was the hand-me-downs from my brother and my mother sewed and made it fit. So you just learn to be Teflon.
About the crap that kids would give each other and then join in and so again you learn to be part of the joke. Make the joke before you. My last name is Underhill. So initially, you know, underwear. That was hey, underwear.
So my brother and I went by the nickname undies. People would call you undies and instead of being upset by it, you just say, yeah, I’m undies. And so it was no longer a joke. It was no longer making fun of you. It was just a badge of honor. And you learn these kinds of tricks.
John Corcoran: 10:32
Especially in New England. New England’s kind of known as a stiff upper lip kind of place. And I say that having lived in Massachusetts, my mom’s from Massachusetts. And you also had your father moved out when your parents divorced and kind of disappeared from your life, largely. What did that do for you also as you’re growing up?
Blake Underhill: 10:55
Yeah. So it was, you know, you learn, as my mom would say, you know, life’s not fair. So you don’t expect it to be. And then, you know, my dad, my natural dad has a great sense of humor, but so I think I got a lot of that from him. But we didn’t get to other than that, we didn’t get to see him much.
You know, again, it was kind of every other weekend once a month to, you know, a couple times a year to the phone calls at your birthday. And so and when we visited him, we’d go to his place and then he would go do his thing and we’d be at his place. So we’d learn to, like, go into the neighborhood and make friends with whoever was there. You learn to explore in the woods by yourself and hopefully, you know, don’t get killed. Don’t get, don’t get stuck in the swamp. But you learned independence because of that. Yeah. And just make do with whatever you had.
John Corcoran: 12:06
So yeah definitely survival skills.
Blake Underhill: 12:10
You end up having a landscape company through high school and college. You had residential accounts, you had commercial accounts, but you didn’t have any entrepreneurs to look up to. Although your mother ended up remarrying and your step dad actually had a business, right?
Blake Underhill: 12:30
Yeah. So when I was 12, my mom remarried and our economic situation changed in many ways. We went. From a kind of disadvantage to a very advantaged situation.
John Corcoran: 12:43
But yeah, she married up.
Blake Underhill: 12:45
She definitely married up to be a great provider. But he was also a depression era baby. And so again, it was not a situation where all of a sudden I was, you know, lavish with money and gifts rolling in the dough. We lived in a very comfortable situation. I no longer had to worry about if we were going to eat.
And I had a nice bicycle. But we didn’t have, like, spending money and my stepfather was like, if you want spending money, you go earn spending money. So when I turned 14 I could legally work. He said, hey, you can come to work in my warehouse. He had an insulation company that also sold insulation and he was installed.
And so I worked in the warehouse one summer, and that was and again, he wanted to teach me a good work ethic. So his rules were like, if you were a minute late, you were 15 minutes late. So he would dock you 15 minutes if you left a minute early. You were docked 15 minutes. Because.
John Corcoran: 13:50
Is this the rules for all of his employees, or was he being extra hard on you?
Blake Underhill: 13:54
Yeah, it was because he’s like, you’re the boss’s kid. You’re the impression. So you have to be early and stay late and, you know, put in more and expect less. And because that’s the impression you have to give. Because, you know, you’re here as my son and you’re a reflection of me. So that’s what we need to do. And as an adult, I understand that. But as a kid, that sucked.
John Corcoran: 14:19
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Blake Underhill: 14:21
He definitely is.
Blake Underhill: 14:22
You know, and the pay was not great. And then, you know, especially after taxes and all that. So, the following summer a friend of mine’s father needed some yard work done. So it was a female friend. And so my best friend at the time and myself he needed.
He had these pine trees that had dead wood. He wanted the trees trimmed. So we did that. We climbed trees. We had little hand saws, did stupid stuff without any safety gear.
And then we spread mulch and we trimmed bushes. We cut down trees. And then the neighbor needed the same thing. So we did that for them. And then the next neighbor needed the same thing. So we did that for them. And then we put an ad in the paper and we started getting phone calls and we were.
John Corcoran: 15:12
Just like.
Blake Underhill: 15:12
Two kids, literally with no vehicle. We either got rides or rode our bicycles or had these adults pick us up and we’d we were day labor of whatever they needed. Yeah. And then we were 15. We got our licenses that winter. And the next year we were full on mowing lawns and because we could drive and I had a pickup truck. So we did everything possible. Stubble. Mulching. Trimming.
Mowing lawns. And it was. It came along pretty well. So then we ended up buying a commercial deck mower instead of these little, you know, 24 inch mowers. I had a 48 inch commercial deck mower. We got a trailer weed Whackers blowers.
John Corcoran: 16:03
You have a legit business by the time you’re in high school here?
Blake Underhill: 16:07
Yeah. And so eventually, when we got a condominium group and then a second condominium group. So we had commercial clients. So if I forget, I think it was, I think it was my sophomore year between my sophomore year. Yeah, it was my sophomore year. My junior year I went abroad. We did $40,000. And so it was 87. In 1987. We did.
John Corcoran: 16:34
Oh, that’s a lot of money back then. Yeah. For working part time.
Blake Underhill: 16:38
In four months. In four months we did $40,000 of income. And we had employees. So we hired our friends as employees. And so we had a crew.
There were between 4 and 5 of us, depending on what we were doing. We said we had all these clients. We were probably working five, six days a week. We were doing railroad ties, walls, all sorts of things that we had no right to do. But, you know, someone said.
John Corcoran: 17:06
You kind of figured it out.
Blake Underhill: 17:07
I need a retaining wall. So I’d go to the library and see how to do a retaining wall and say, yeah, we could do that. But knowing no one was there to tell me that it was a real business.
John Corcoran: 17:18
And yeah, I’m curious because you said you’re you said your stepfather had businesses, owned businesses. It sounds like he taught you a work ethic but didn’t teach you about business ownership. Is that the distinction here?
Blake Underhill: 17:29
Kind of. Yeah. Is that that it was again, I think it was as academically I was I didn’t achieve much. So again, people were like, no, you need to work for somebody else. You need to go get a job.
They weren’t seeing that like, oh, he’s got the gumption and the hustle to be something else. Yeah. They always looked at the negative. You know, he talked to me about things like, running my books. And I kept really the most rudimentary ugly books. But again, I’m not a numbers guy. Yeah. Dyslexia is a good hurdle to running good, strong bookkeeping.
John Corcoran: 18:09
It sounds to me like maybe there’s a tinge of regret in you telling this story here, that you’re kind of feeling like you wish that someone had told you that you had a legit business here at this point.
Blake Underhill: 18:22
My, my, my 20s would have been completely different. My 20s were me jumping from job to job, employer to employer, from career track to career track, not gaining traction anywhere. Because I was looking for someone else to give me something that I kind of already had. And everywhere.
John Corcoran: 18:50
That’s pretty profound, isn’t it? There’s that. You’re not the first person to have that type of realization later in life that they had something that they were actually looking for elsewhere.
Blake Underhill: 19:01
Yeah, I just didn’t know it and there was no one who could. I didn’t have a mentor. That’s my biggest problem, is my life really changed when I discovered mentors and to actually listen to people and, and found people that were encouraging.
John Corcoran: 19:18
Who was that? Was there one person that became a mentor for you?
Blake Underhill: 19:22
Yeah, the first one. My first mentor beyond my stepfather. I don’t know if he was quite mentoring as more instructional, but the first mentor I had was my sister’s husband, who was an entrepreneur in insulation, I mean, Insurance services, and he looked at me very empathetic and kind of said, yeah, like, you can do it. Don’t listen to other people. And
He’s like, do what you do really well and hire people to do things that you don’t want to do or don’t do well. And I was like, well, it was the first time anyone told me to like, focus on the good and ignore the bad. Yeah. Just on your strengths and like, leave the weaknesses behind. There’s other people. That’s their strength. And let them do it.
John Corcoran: 20:19
And so you have kind of jumped around from job to job, and then you eventually go actually to work for your stepfather’s business or one of them, and you end up purchasing that business from him. Right?
Blake Underhill: 20:32
Right. So in my late 20s, I moved to New York, worked for a real estate firm that was That was doing. I was a project manager in their construction division. They sent me to NYU, where I got a diploma in construction management, and met my now wife. We moved and at that point, my stepfather was diagnosed with cancer and I was the only one of the kids, my natural brother and three step siblings.
I was the only one in construction. So he asked me to come back and start working in the business. He had three businesses: New England Insulation, New England Abatement Resources and AF Underhill. I came in, my last name is Underhill. It was kind of a natural thing. I was, and I came in and took over AF Underhill and bought that from him.
John Corcoran: 21:23
And when you stepped into that, when you stepped into that business, what condition was it in? Did you find that it was a well oiled machine, or was it something where like, you know, you were like, oh, I would do all these things differently. What was that dynamic, like for you, while your stepfather’s also, you know, dying of cancer.
Blake Underhill: 21:43
It had a person managing it, and they did a good job. I mean, I wouldn’t call it a well-oiled machine, but it was a good machine. They had a really good team, a very strong team. They had three different divisions. And when I came in, it was more like learning the business, that aspect of the business, like I knew construction, but there was the sub specialty subcontractor doing three specialty niche work.
So learning that, getting the respect of the team, working with the team, and as I was doing that and I think did that fairly successfully. My father asked my stepfather to call him my father, but my stepfather asked me to get involved in the other businesses. So I became the COO of New England Insulation Asian and New England abatement resources. So I was running those two businesses for my family and running Underhill for myself.
John Corcoran: 22:45
Got it. And then tell me what happened then, because your stepfather passed away, but your, your, your step siblings and your natural brother became the board of directors that you had to report up to, for Underhill.
Blake Underhill: 23:01
Yeah. So my mom was still alive. And then, you know, my three step things in my, my natural brother pretty at this point we’re all siblings. So I feel weird calling them step siblings because at this point, you know, we’re all siblings. But they were my board of directors.
They weren’t in construction. Construction is all about risk management, so it’s very risk oriented. That’s not something that they were not necessarily super comfortable with. Even though that was my background. And so it was a very uncomfortable situation where I was kind of before I was free to do whatever, and now I was like reporting to people.
And one of my big motivators is kind of freedom from judgment and all that. So reporting to someone is not after not having to report to people was not something that I was super happy with. And so I bought New England Abatement Resources, which is a smaller company, the New England Association was doing, you know, 15 to 20 million a year. New England’s main resource is probably three, 2 or 3. So I bought that company and at the same time I met my partner in the safety business.
So we did a lot of work for power plants, industrial. We’re very, very industrial focused. And so one of the plants we were working for was very friendly with the plant manager, and they had these safety needs. They needed these safety professionals on site to do safety walk downs and have standby rescue teams. The company that was providing that service was going belly up.
And their site person, they really liked him. So they said, hey, would you hire him? And just keep him on, at least for this outage? And I met with him. He’s a great guy and had a, you know, really knew that aspect of the business.
And I was like, hey, you know, these are our current client base, which is power plants that need this service. This would be a great division of the insulation company. I went back to the board of directors. They disagreed. They felt it was kind of off brand and we, you know, disagreed because I, I was like our current customers want us to provide a service that provides that service.
And like, no, we’re an insulation company, not a safety company. So I said, you know what? Let’s split. So I made the safety division of the New England Abatement Resources. I took that and I left the installation company. They hired a new president. And, you know, I had a good transition. You know, I didn’t leave them in the lurch. They didn’t kind of fire me the next day. So it worked for everybody.
John Corcoran: 26:00
And AF Underhill was what happened with AF Underhill.
Blake Underhill: 26:04
So in 2010. So I think everyone kind of remembers 2008 whoever lived with it. Yeah. The impact of 2008 on the construction department, on the construction industry happened later because of the lag time of contracts and everything. So in 2009 and 2010, one of our divisions, we did a lot of supermarket renovation, and we were basically one of three bidders for 2 or 3 different supermarkets.
And we were the same three guys chasing this work, and all of a sudden it went to 13 bidders and the work was selling below my cost. And so a good almost half of my business evaporated almost overnight. And so I didn’t react nearly fast enough. So that was quickly going down the tubes. And luckily through help and support from my forum mates from EO, my EO forum mates, I was able to find a buyer and was able to sell that business. And get out before it took the whole ship down.
John Corcoran: 27:14
And so and you’ve said that New England abatement. So at this point you have I think you have three businesses at this point. The new safety division, you got near the New England Abatement resources and you’ve got AF Underhill, but then it goes down to two.
Blake Underhill: 27:30
Yes. I was Running. All three owned one of them. One of them went down. So now I’m running too. I bought one of those and then created a division within that. So okay. A lot happened in 2010, 11 and 12. A lot happened in my life.
John Corcoran: 27:49
Yeah. And in construction as well. And, and so I’m sensing a repeating pattern here which is having a lot of balls in the air, multiple businesses. And we teased at the beginning the idea of using AI to minimize the number of balls that you have in the air. So let’s talk a little bit about that.
How are you utilizing AI? This is a bit fascinating to me because, I mean, we are a digital remote first distributed workforce, my company. And so I can see the application for AI for that. But you have more of a brick and mortar, traditional type of, you know, business. How are you leveraging AI today?
Blake Underhill: 28:26
So it first started, I would say probably a year, Probably maybe a year, maybe a little more than a year ago. You know, one of the things we do is provide safety plans for different companies and in general, in the past it’s been generic. But we had a very few customers come to us with a very small specific niche that we knew we knew general safety, but safety specifically for them. And they wanted us to build training programs and all these things. And it’s a lot of work to do that.
So I was experimenting. A friend of mine was like, oh, you know, use ChatGPT. So I narrated it to ChatGPT and it probably took about three hours. Ask it, ask it again. Ask it a different way.
Okay. Give me more details here, more details there. And after about three four hours I had a ten page safety manual. Very specific for this one trade. I had to do the proofreading, but 70% of the work, which probably would have taken me three days, was done in three hours.
John Corcoran: 29:42
Wow.
Blake Underhill: 29:43
And then I spent another 2 or 3 hours proofreading. But again, asking ChatGPT for, you know, references like, okay, you said this, give me the OSHA standard that you’re referring to. Yeah. You know, there may be misinterpreted things here and there, but I had to reinterpret them. But things that would have taken me 4 or 5 hours were taking me half an hour.
John Corcoran: 30:13
Wow.
Blake Underhill: 30:14
So that the return on speed. It can. You know, I’m a safety professional. I spent a lot of time, but I don’t memorize. Spending time memorizing the OSHA standard is a waste of time. Yeah. ChatGPT can search that stuff instantly.
John Corcoran: 30:33
Yeah.
Blake Underhill: 30:34
You need to reaffirm. And now then you. But now I know where to go in the OSHA standard to make sure that it is quoting the exact thing I’m looking for.
John Corcoran: 30:42
Yeah. And some of these are like, I’m a big fan of perplexity because they have citations in there. I don’t know if you’ve played around with that, but it has little links. And you click on the link and it’ll take you to the standard. If it’s something that’s referenced.
Blake Underhill: 30:54
I’m starting now because again, I’ve been using ChatGPT. People are now like, well, you should again refer to other AI because that’s what I need to do is find another AI that gives me those reference points. Yeah, I’m currently writing last week or two weeks ago now, we had some major construction incidents happen based on some windstorms we had leading to one fatality, and I’m writing a safety article about that. So. Like pulling up wind standards.
Well, OSHA doesn’t necessarily have the standards. Those are Ansi standards. And there’s there’s sub standards other than OSHA refers to. But pulling all those details out to make sure that I’m quoting the right thing the right way. It’s been really helpful. But having an AI that will give me those reference points will make it faster.
John Corcoran: 31:52
And just to get back to the original topic, we teased of, you know, the idea of like, it’s of how distracting it can be to have multiple different businesses you’re running at once. Really kind of the perils behind that is that there’s only so many hours in the day and you can’t, you know, manage and keep an eye on these different things. But if if you’re compressing down three days of work down to a couple of hours, then suddenly it makes managing different businesses more manageable or, you know, serving different verticals, serving, serving different niches, because you can spin up a report that’s unique to a particular industry a lot quicker than you could have before.
Blake Underhill: 32:29
Well, it’s also learning how to better delegate. So there were tasks that I would take on personally that I just don’t have the bandwidth to do. And training other people to do those things. So I have one. One of my guys is writing a standard operating procedure for a rescue in a very specific situation for a customer.
He’s very knowledgeable. He’s actually the one who taught them how to do the rescue. But getting documenting that and the processes and the process step by step. That is something that I would do, but I want him to do it. So I just asked ChatGPT and I said, pretend you’re me.
I mean, it was a longer sentence, but I basically said, pretend you’re me and help me write an outline and a guide for this other safety professional on how to create a standard operating guide for this customer relative to rescue. And you know, it blurted something out, which was probably 70 to 80% accurate. I tweaked it, I asked it to do some revisions. Then I put it in a word document, made some additional tweaks, and sent it to this guy. So instead of me fumbling around for an hour or two, him getting frustrated, me getting frustrated, I was able to quickly give him a document and a guide on how to achieve what I wanted him to achieve.
John Corcoran: 34:00
Yeah.
Blake Underhill: 34:01
Because I’m not good at downloading what’s in my brain. I can see it. I can literally see it.
John Corcoran: 34:09
But a lot of people are, I think that is common, that people are good at doing things. But, you know, being forced to like to sit down and type out the thing that they do is oftentimes a very different skill set. And people don’t. They chafe against it. They don’t enjoy doing that.
Blake Underhill: 34:25
I’ve always been really bad at delegating and one of my goals this year is to become a lot better at it. And, I would say AI is helping me because I can, in a very conversational way, ask it to do something. And I find that it is accurate. There’s a couple times where it’s been spot on and 100% zero edits. Usually I need to make some edits, but something that would take me an hour or two or even longer because it frustrates me. And so I put it off. I’m able to put out in five, ten, 15 minutes with just blurt out what I want to. It gives me something that is really close enough.
John Corcoran: 35:08
Yeah, pretty amazing. Or even like a plan of like different tasks and who it should be assigned to, which is really cool as well. It can help, which can help with delegation as well. Blake, I know we’re almost out of time, so we’ll wrap there. But my last question is my gratitude.
So I’m a big fan of, you know, practicing gratitude. And I just would love to know from you, you know, are there any particular peers, contemporaries, mentors who’ve been important in your life that you would want to shout out and thank?
Blake Underhill: 35:35
So, I mean, there’s the discovery of mentors in my life, and I’ve had several that have helped make me who I am. But the one particular scenario was we talked about AF Underhill and when it got into crisis mode, because we lost all this volume and work, I’d gotten to a point where I was in pure panic mode because the company really was circling the toilet bowl. It was going down quickly. In the heyday, we ran 75 to 100 men in the field and we were down to 18. And I was frozen in fear and literally just didn’t know what to do.
And my forum mate took a day off from his business. He was much stronger, stronger financially. He was able to come in and look at the books and talk about the company and spend a whole day with me. And he came back and said, listen, it’s not as bad as you think it is. You’re in panic mode, but you’re just staring at the forest and you’re not seeing the trees.
You have something here. You have something special here. And from that, I was able to go back out, talk to some competitors who were actually very interested in buying one division in particular, but were willing to take over the whole company to get this one division. And I made a deal because one of the things I didn’t, I owed the bank a lot of money as we went down. I was borrowing and borrowing kind of.
John Corcoran: 37:06
It happened a lot in oh nine, 2010 where, yeah, people thought it would rebound. It took longer and they ended up racking up a bunch of debt.
Blake Underhill: 37:14
And it happened. It happened a lot faster than I had planned on or hadn’t planned at all. But I got to the point where I was actually to sell the company for, you know, a couple dollars more than what I owed the bank. But I was in crisis bankruptcy mode, like, I’m, I was in panic because I was like, I have to file bankruptcy. Like, oh my God.
And he let me see that, knowing that I had an asset. I just had to market it and go to the right people. And I was able to sell that asset, pay off the bank and survive to fight another day. And so I’m, I’m eternally grateful to my forum in general. But that one forum mate just really he’s he in all humility he, he’s like, I don’t know, I didn’t do anything. I was like, he doesn’t appreciate the impact he had on me at that moment. He’s like, I didn’t sell the company. I just spent some time with you and kind of slapped you around.
John Corcoran: 38:16
It’s just like you looking at those blueprints and seeing it in 3D. He was the same way, you know. He was looking at your business. He could see it in 3D. You couldn’t, you know, you were just looking at the jumble of lines like I do when I look at blueprints, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Blake Underhill: 38:32
So that’s why I try to tell people that none of us do this alone.
John Corcoran: 38:35
Yeah. Blake, this has been great. Thank you for sharing your stories. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you and follow up if they have any questions?
Blake Underhill: 38:43
So there’s LinkedIn or my website, www.industrialsafetyrescue.com as the best way to find out what we do and reach out to me. But then my email is [email protected] and I’m always happy to chat about what we do and and and learn from others.
John Corcoran: 39:03
Great. Blake thanks so much.
Blake Underhill: 39:05
Great. Thank you.
Outro: 39:09
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.