Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Our guest is Veronica Whitesell. Veronica welcome.

VERONICA WHITESELL (00:46)
Welcome. Thank you.

Rishi Srivastava (00:48)
The first section here is from pipelines to renewables. Your career arc reads like four different careers stitched together. Animal science, seven years on active pipelines, owning an insurance agency, and now dynamite R &D. What's actually the same job in all of them?

VERONICA WHITESELL (01:12)
all of the things that I've done, think, the, I attribute it to the same thing I've done and all of those would probably be critical thinking.

when you're working with horses or any kind of animal, you have to understand as being the human, you are relatively the predator. So you have to learn how to communicate that you're not the big bad wolf. That kind of goes hand in hand with being in business and communication you know, throughout life and kind of comes into the insurance. So I dealt with

risk assessment liability. and I'm not an attorney, I'm not a financial advisor, but when you look at those kinds of things, you have to almost put like your legal hat on and think, you know, how could this go bad? How could, you know, this impact not just my cashflow, but my business's future, you know, things like that. And, and when you do,

That kind of is the same thing within pipeline. You know, you're putting…

You have to critical think through your day, as in the projects you're doing, know, pipeline kind of like what we do in our Dynamite R &D is very, I mean, you can put your life on the line. You can have other people's lives in your hands. So you've got to think through things through, how does this affect me? How does it affect other people? How does this affect the bottom line of, you know, maybe the business or the industry or the day, all the things together?

all those things together come back to critical thinking for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (02:45)
Actually, I started a company four years ago and when you're a founder like yourself you have all the hats accounting, lawyer, marketing, sales, know everything cleaning the toilet everything is on you.

VERONICA WHITESELL (02:59)
Yes,

yes, yes, yeah all the way through mm-hmm

Rishi Srivastava (03:03)
Yeah. In your pipeline career, you were an operations tech directing large projects on live pipelines, pressure testing, re-sleeving, hot work, Loto, NCCER, tank 653s. What did pipeline ops teach you about managing crews, compliance, and relationships that you brought directly into Dynamite?

VERONICA WHITESELL (03:22)
Mm-hmm.

The biggest thing for that is process. that's like my, that's the word that I use that everyone in my, you know, that either works for us or in our organization hates. I'm always saying, hey, what's the process for this? And process can be used a kind of a couple of different ways of a single person's way of doing something or an actual standard operating procedure. So, you know,

What pipeline taught me was you planning, which is again a process, and you have to keep improving those processes. So you can't get complacent. Complacency is, man, that can spread like a virus. It creates the old saying, we've always done it this way, so we're gonna keep doing it that way.

That is, I hate that. I hate it. And it usually comes out of older guys mouths have been around for a long time and they're teaching the young whippersnappers how to do things and that, being complacent in your processes, that stifles your growth. I think the main reason why,

you know, super small companies can get ahead, especially like 2025, 2026, is because they're willing to innovate new ideas, know, new, new software, new apps, new way of doing things, but also keeping and incorporating all of those new things into the process. And it kind of goes back to you have to keep improving the process. So that's kind of, you know, that's the biggest thing it taught me was what's A, what's B, what's C.

And when you lay that out almost in a map in front of you, you're going to cut out a lot of the, hey, we forgot this, or hey, we didn't realize that this was going to be a problem. I mean, it's all process.

Rishi Srivastava (05:24)
Such a great point, know 2025 world has changed and 2026 the world has changed so much. So I was talking to a VC and he used to fund construction tech companies. And now he says that the software selling is like selling porta potty now. So he's saying that construction companies don't want to change and he's raised a lot of money and he's building a construction company himself, a construction management company and he's gonna deliver 30 % faster.

for 30 % less cost because he's going to use everything cutting edge.

VERONICA WHITESELL (05:59)
yeah, and that's like, I'll just use an example. I mean, you know, we just switched over to Foundations ERP.

from QuickBooks and I'm not an accountant. Like you said earlier, we have to wear all the hats, right? When we're a founder and an owner and operator, I've done the field work in my past career. It's a little different than what we're doing now, but to me, the processes are similar. so when you are looking at, what, cause time is money, money is time, time is money. So if there's a, a something you can bring in software or a person or something you can bring in that

will help.

mitigate those pain points that you have or something that costs you a lot of time, especially as an owner, you don't have time to sit there and put journal entries and your accounting and all the things. So the faster you can start incorporating that. Yeah, it's expensive upfront. However, if you if you cost it out and you look at what it's going to save you in time or save you in process, you're going to be so far ahead of the mark. I mean, we still have union, you know,

union offices working on strictly paper. And sometimes our mail system takes 30 days to get a letter or a contribution letter from our place to 15 miles away because of their process. It has to go to Chicago. It has to come back. And it's a three to 30 day process. I don't know why it is what it is, but it's not efficient. Processes…

and and you know using cutting-edge technology cuts the fat it can really impact even if you let's say you're impacting your bottom line on a project by one percent more revenue you start stacking that up that's a huge that's a huge chunk

Rishi Srivastava (07:47)
Mm-hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (07:48)
That's a huge chunk. And when you can onboard somebody who's like, hey, I know how to use that, or it's super simple and it takes away a ton of time and steps, dude, you're just winning, you know, every single time that you're utilizing it.

Rishi Srivastava (08:01)
Yeah, think companies are scared of change, right? They've done things a certain way for the past 20, 30, 50 years, whatever. It's tough to swallow that change. You gotta learn new things.

VERONICA WHITESELL (08:16)
Yeah. I mean, I come from pipeline where we're literally using 1960s technology and we're just like upgrading safety and upgrading certain things, but they're like, no, this is what we've always done it. And I'm like, I, I, I understand. I get that. There's other ways that we can do some things. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (08:33)
Dynamite has had 116 % year over year growth since you started in 2022. How were you able to grow that from the ground up to now?

VERONICA WHITESELL (08:46)
The simplest way I can put it is our favorite words and what we stand by, what we live by, even inside, outside of business, integrity, continuity and drive. It's amazing to me in 2026 how…

someone with the want and the hunger and the drive, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. No one in construction is reinventing the wheel. know, history repeats itself. We're going through a solar energy boom, no different than we went through a wind energy boom, no different than we went through an oil energy boom. It will come. It will stagnate out. It will be maintenance time instead of installation.

We're not reinventing the wheel. But when you've got so many, you've got the younger generation coming in, and I'm 41, I'm not afraid to tell you my age, I'm 41. I started in pipeline when I was 23. That was fun coming out of college as a 23 year old blonde female and going directly into the wolf's lair.

It's crazy to me how so many companies, large or small, they're inefficient. They're not willing to put in the work past putting time. Not all of them, obviously, and not everybody who works for them. But there's a lot of issues that we have as a main subcontractor and a preferred subcontractor for some of these bigger venture-backed companies of just people doing their job. I can't do my job and deliver.

my job unless you know the field on their side gets us the information gets us the contract signed and started like there's so many steps in the process of that they're not checking off the box and then they think sending out an email to someone is just okay it's off my plate I don't have to deal with it they're not checking back they're not you know making sure things are getting done some of them are but I also think a lot of it comes down to

the experience issues, you know, of young people don't have a ton of that experience. But like, the other thing I attribute it to is brand, brand building, and it doesn't mean just a logo. You know…

When you're creating your brand for your company, your brand is what people think of your company from the outside looking in. And the best way to build that and protect it is out of employees' mouths. And so no one's gonna take care of your business like you will.

Rishi Srivastava (11:12)
Mmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (11:18)
But if you take care of your employees, if you give them a company they can work for to be proud of, and I mean like super proud, for one, your turnover rate's gonna be low. For two, you're gonna have people lined up at your door knocking at your door saying, hey, I work for you, hey, I wanna work for you. Those are the biggest things, the integrity of doing what you say you're gonna do when you say you're gonna do it. The continuity of doing it in a, doing it the

Rishi Srivastava (11:27)
Mm-hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (11:46)
it's expected to be done every single time even when no one's looking. know, under promise, over deliver, all of those little nuance-y sayings that everyone says that a lot of people will say up front and they won't, they will not commit and actually end up executing on.

Rishi Srivastava (12:03)
You know, one thing that growth exposes is the weakness of your processes. When you are operating a small scale, you can get away with a lot of inefficiency. You, yourself are managing all the chaos.

VERONICA WHITESELL (12:09)
yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and my dog's name is Chaos, so I literally manage Chaos every single day.

Rishi Srivastava (12:23)
But like when you grow and let's say you grow another 100 % next year, now you know the fire is going to be bigger, know, it's going be harder for you to control, you better figure out some system.

VERONICA WHITESELL (12:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and the system comes down to, you know, a lot of people's like, how did you do this? How do you do this? I'm like, well, for one, it's sacrificing like all of the things, man. You know, for, for a long time, for the first two years, we didn't really go out to eat. We didn't go on vacation. We didn't splurge. None of meh, none of that. And you have to be willing to do that.

And there's a lot of places, there's a lot of companies that that's why they filter out in like three years of startup after startup because they're just not willing to put, you know, I hate this, I hate this saying, but you know, put your head down and grind. Like that's, if you don't love that process, this is not for you. This is not for you.

You cannot expect your employees to work as hard and as long and as many hours as you do because their name's not on the mailbox. You know, but that doesn't mean that you don't expect them to work hard, but they also are human beings and they don't have the skin in the game that you do.

Rishi Srivastava (13:33)
Actually, I heard it somewhere. You have to cheer yourself for first three, four years because nobody else is cheering for you. You're suffering.

VERONICA WHITESELL (13:39)
No, there is no

one that is happy for you at all. They're all like, it sounds so good. That's great. You're doing that. And then when you start, like, you know, you'll you'll start reclusing into why, why do I want to go to dinner with blah, blah, blah, blah, or, know, this person, that person, when they're just being nosy anyway, because usually like, why would I get a phone call like, hey, we'd like to go to dinner with you, blah, blah.

Rishi Srivastava (13:45)
you

VERONICA WHITESELL (14:05)
we've never really been to dinner, Susan, like.

You know what I mean? it's you do you start reclusing in you start losing for you lose some friends man like you lose especially when you live in a small a small a small town and no one in that town nobody in that town is going to cheer for you they're not going to buy your product you know they're going to buy Kim Kardashian stuff before they even come close to buying yours like it's but when you make it make it like yeah we've been friends for so long I'm like uh-huh sure

Rishi Srivastava (14:14)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (14:36)
Sure. Sure. Sure, Mom.

Rishi Srivastava (14:36)
So another saying is

before you succeed they tell you why you're working so hard and after you succeed they tell you you got lucky.

VERONICA WHITESELL (14:43)
⁓ Yeah, ⁓ Yeah, it's so much luck my favorite

is you guys you need to take some time for yourself you need to And I always do like this weird girl like voice with that cuz that's usually the that's what I hear when it comes out of your mouth Whether it's a man or woman you just take time for yourself you you know you can't pour from an empty cup my cup was empty a long damn time ago like

Rishi Srivastava (15:08)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (15:09)
But in four or five years, like we're getting to the point now to where there is light at the end of the tunnel. You know, we're now seeing and we've put processes in place.

We've just been consistently reinvesting the money back into the business, back into the business. And then we've also now gotten to the point where, okay, well, we need to diversify. And there's some other things that I want to do that I have connections and contacts with. So I've kind of branched off and started some completely different industry, know, side hustles for now that will take off and do some different things. And I believe in multi-revenue streams. You know, you're going to have a law in one business

where another business can pick up for that. You're not going to share funds, but you're going to be able to kind of, you know, complement each other even if it's not the same industry.

Rishi Srivastava (15:52)
Yeah, the

one thing that is always constant in this world is change. So your business is gonna change no matter what you think about it right now. Because the world is changing so fast.

VERONICA WHITESELL (16:01)
Yeah, absolutely.

Dude, I love change. Everyone's so afraid of like laws and regulations. I'm always like, how can I work in the gray area? How can I maximize this issue? Instead of the doom gloom? I'm that person over here like, heck yeah, change. I'm loving this because now I have like, now I'm like, I could sneak over from from second to third base and no one's gonna pay attention. You know, I'm always that

Rishi Srivastava (16:19)
Thank you.

VERONICA WHITESELL (16:27)
that, I mean, I always prepare us to be put, like I prepare to have options when, if we ever find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, like that's how my brain works. But I'm always thinking five to 10 years ahead of everybody, be like, what's the trend, what's coming, what can I do now to help us jump ahead there?

Rishi Srivastava (16:46)
Actually, I have not met a construction owner who's as forward looking as you. I hope my other listeners can take that.

VERONICA WHITESELL (16:52)
It's crazy

because people just look at me like I've got a basket of snakes on my head like What and three or four years down the road? They're like, hey this new thing's come like hey remember that one remember that one time I told you that and you said I was nuts cool awesome Like we're already we're already prepared to step in the middle of that like we're set up. We're ready like that's Yeah, it's it's crazy

Rishi Srivastava (17:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

The next section here, Veronica, is the bank gauntlet. You went to seven or eight banks before one would back a brand new construction business. What were they actually telling you no to? And what was different about the one that finally said yes?

VERONICA WHITESELL (17:35)
When you go to any financial institution, they're gonna put you into a proverbial box and they're gonna put that, there's a label on that box. And depending on what you show up with in your hands or digitally, whatever it is, the way you wanna do it, is gonna decide what box you get put in.

probably 80 % of small newer construction companies are going to be put in the same box. And that comes down to your accounting sucks or doesn't exist.

You think you know your numbers, but you don't actually know how money works in construction. It's not the same as regular cash in cash out, not by far. And just knowing, like if you don't know job costing, if you're not doing job costing, there's no way for you to show actual profit revenue.

you know, or I'm sorry, actual profit on your jobs. So yes, you can show, hey, we've made X amount of dollars. Our expenditures are X amount of dollars. But that doesn't tell the whole story. We learned that through banks kind of like, yeah, we'll take some time after lunch. Come in and talk like that. I'm I'm the person I'm like, listen, I got my stuff prepared. I'm going to pitch you like I want you to say and and most of.

I found that going to small banks that people we know work at in our little hometown area or around us, if you don't already come from a construction company that's 30 or 40 years old, they're not taking you serious anyway. They're just not.

And so it's kind of a, they're just, you know, placating you and just meeting you and then, well, when you have this come back to us or well, we can do 50,000 on this five, you know, a 50,000 line of credit on this $500,000, you know, project that you sitting, you're sitting there with a contract in your hand. And I'm like, what am I supposed to do with $50,000? Like, am I supposed to like, you know, buy my guys some t-shirts with that? Like that doesn't even get us

Rishi Srivastava (19:28)
hehe

VERONICA WHITESELL (19:33)
close started the first 30 days. You know, when you're moving, moving out, moving all the things. And we're not even that like, it was almost an insult to me of I have one of these contracts, I have a history of these contracts turning into almost a million dollars by time the year is over. You know, like that, but I had no way to show them that. And if you can't speak with numbers, you can't speak at all.

They want to be able to just look at paper, look at the numbers, the numbers, and the numbers on the paper tell the story, and that's what they want to see. They don't want to sit there and ask you 75 questions, and then you have to look it up and find it from this document over here. You need to have it ready to go.

Rishi Srivastava (20:16)
Yeah.

What did that financing process look like in practice? What did you have to put on the table personally? And what would you tell a first-time construction owner to prepare before they walk into their first bank meeting?

VERONICA WHITESELL (20:31)
Kind of going back to some of stuff we just talked about. Our financial process completely changed from the first time we met to the final bank that we got together with. Not only was it our double journal entry accounting, I mean that's standard.

I think it's like GABA 36 or whatever, whatever that GABA, whatever that standard is for most, that's mostly the American national standard. Also putting together, you know, making sure that on your financial statement, you have all of your debt, all of your revenue, everything you own.

If you're an S Corp and you're a shareholder, you need to have a personal statement versus a business statement. And there better not be any piercing of the veil between them. And that's a big thing that a lot of your small contractors, they think that just because they step outside and they proclaim, I'm a sole proprietor, that that's what that means. I'm like, that's not how that works. But, know, having your business entity set up in a state that you are domiciled, having your insurance, having everything and

everything job costed out from your overhead to what this job cost you, here's what you bid, here's your actual cost, you bid it too low so you lost money, you bid it pretty well so you actually gained more profit than what you thought. Those are all of the things that you need to have together in a portfolio. Like I said, the numbers on the pages need to tell the story of your business. Need to say this is what we do.

you know, just kind of…

There's gonna be things that you think is gonna be the right thing to do as a small because of the amount of resources you have to work with. Let's say you have an older truck that you've been using.

and it's got some issues and so you want to rehab it, know, fix it, put some parts in it. Nine times out of ten, that's a really bad idea. We learned that lesson of rehabbing two trucks last year. It's seventy thousand dollars total for two trucks. We will never realize that those actual dollars in those trucks. What we that helped us build a process for the future. I mean, we could have went and bought a brand new truck at that, you know, and not and had one less issue to deal with.

Be prepared. You gotta have a good credit score personally. You've gotta have a good credit score for your business and a good pay your bills on time all the time. If there is an issue, contact whoever you owe and say, hey, I'm promising you X amount of dollar, like just communication that will help you.

Um, but you've got to be making sure that the money you're making in your business is going back into your business and funding your business. You can just, Oh, I got a $50,000 contract and I got my first draw. I'm going to go buy a side by side with it. Like banks are that you laugh. That happens a lot around here. It happens a lot. I mean, we do, we do use side by sides to weld out of, but they're not like, and we're actually getting ready to transition into either like gen two wrap

or something like that that we can license and drive down the road from these job sites. But the first time it's going to be hard. You're going to have to work really hard. You're going to have to sacrifice all of the things. You're going have to sell the boat. you might look at downsides in your house. When we started this, I knew we had to keep reinvesting the money into the business. I even took on a part-time sales job.

Rishi Srivastava (23:48)
Mm-hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (23:49)
and all of the other things I was doing in my daily responsibilities for business. For one, and it was a cold calling job. Oh my God, this was 20, this was 2022 and I hated it and I hated the idea, but there was a reason. I wanted to know how prevalent in marketing that actually where I've never done that before. And I wanted to know why it sucked, why it didn't work.

Rishi Srivastava (23:58)
my god.

VERONICA WHITESELL (24:18)
And it took me about three weeks in out of a six month stint to figure out this is dumb. Why are we doing this? But

It paid me money and I made some commission because I'm a talker, you can tell. But I don't BS people and that's, I just, yeah, so sometimes, know, wifey or spouse might need to like keep a hold of their job for a minute or you might need to keep a hold of like, you know, your moonlighting job for a moment to get things rolling the right direction.

Rishi Srivastava (24:46)
Yeah, so before starting my business for five years I've been contemplating planning and saving, know, and then once you take that jump and there's no regular paycheck coming, you know, and your family is going to like it. They don't.

VERONICA WHITESELL (24:58)
No! No!

No, no. My husband and I are very fortunate because it's just us. You know, we don't have any kids. We have family, we have two dogs, and my gosh, as long as they just keep getting their real good dog food and get to go to the kennels they get to go to and do the things they get to go and do. But we are two very different people. Actually, we're kind of the same people, but we're very different from others. We are those that…

You know, when I left my pipeline career, I left for a couple of different reasons. But I went, I mean, I even went to college knowing I did not want to work for somebody else. I mean, I went to college. I was an equine scholarship Western rider for an equestrian team. and I was very good at judging and just in doing that industry. that's, you know,

on my stepdad's side of the family that was, that's all I grew up doing was horses and then some oil field stuff and different things and welding and all that, that kind of goes with farm life. But I went in knowing I did not want to work for anybody else. Well, they hang the carrot out in front of you of, 2008, there's a $30 an hour job. You could work for Pipeline. Okay, I'm game. And I was there for about seven and a half years and about four and a half years in, I was like, I've had enough of this.

Rishi Srivastava (26:24)
You

VERONICA WHITESELL (26:24)
I've had enough of this, you sell everything man. Like when you make the transition, if you are not selling something and getting rid of loans and stacking, stacking money up and, actually doing the work to get there to start, you should not, you should not be pulling the plug on whatever else you're doing and jumping in.

Rishi Srivastava (26:44)
Yeah, great points. So again, continuing on the bank gauntlet. Looking back, would you do it the same way today, or is there a path you wish you'd taken instead of the bank gauntlet route?

VERONICA WHITESELL (26:56)
I mean…

like to use the saying there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. Knowing what I know now, wouldn't go, I wouldn't do it the same way. However, hindsight's always 20-20. Right? Right? So, I mean, it wouldn't change if I didn't know what I know now. But, the… I'm not…

Rishi Srivastava (27:05)
Mmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (27:17)
We're getting into looking at doing some partnerships on a separate, like on a separate, building a separate business for that. I think partnerships and I think stakeholders within your business can be really good, but when you are as hard-headed as me and you are as forethought and sightful as me, unless it's a very,

you know, very special individual to partner with. I usually scare the pants off of most people when I'm like, listen, this is what's going to be a big thing in the next 10 years. And they're just like, why are we putting money to it? Like they would just be like, why are we putting money towards that? I'm like, because I'm telling you, like that's I've not been wrong. And it's history repeating itself is just with different industries. And then you watch the rules and the regulations change and you watch things that are brought to the table and in committees and

and white papers that are produced by, you know, just universities and industry folks and the bank in our area, the bank route is really the only way to go for us. You know, once you do that, you evaluate your company, you get good processes in, you get some certifications, ISO and women owned and all the things, and then you can kind of look at some other some other options to do way bigger jobs. But yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (28:30)
The next section here is renewables wild west

VERONICA WHITESELL (28:34)
Mm-hmm.

Rishi Srivastava (28:35)
You went from the pipeline, opsworld, lotto, OSHA, API, EPA, DOT, all by the book into utility solar, which you've called quote unquote the wild west. What are the specific things oil and gas had nailed that renewable is still working on?

VERONICA WHITESELL (28:57)
I mean considering oil and gas has over a hundred years of history and you know things to be able to write their processes by I would say I would say renewables not just solar not just when I would say renewables in general is it would be process you know I mean

Safety has upgraded tremendously, you know, with oil and gas.

But some of the techniques and some of the things we're utilizing come from the 60s and 70s. And that's okay because it works and it's like, this is the clear direction of how to do this. You know, in oil and gas, you get your NCCER certs. You know, you can drain up and open a pig trap. can utilize, you know how to utilize double block and bleed, you know, annular valves for lockout, tag out. You know, you can find space, enter like all of those little nuancey things that you're gonna get through certifications.

you don't really have that on the installation side of like renewables. Yes, you've got to be, let's say, a journeyman electrician, or you've got to have this certification, you know, and have this much experience to work on the crew that hooks into the grid, vice versa, you know, to operate a crane and all of the different things that go like wind and solar and all of those. But there's still a lot of I know these companies have processes

but I don't know how much their culture is of this is the way we do things. From company to company and job to job there's a lot of nuances with the kind of system we're installing. There's a couple of different you know solar systems that are out there. They have different ways from bolting caps on

Like from bolding caps on the inverter pads to welding caps instead, and like just different things that engineering think like, hey, this is how we want to do this. And then a lot of times what happens is you get into that and either a part is manufactured wrong or something was drilled wrong, doesn't quite fit. You have to go in and mitigate. in the pipeline and gas world and the oil and gas and pipeline world, that's

that is an issue to go outside of the scope. And so that's like a…

all hands off. We can't do things way, way people way, way above our heads have to need to be making these decisions. And in the utility and renewable side, it's just kind of like, hey, Scott and Bob got together and they think that's a great idea. And they sent it to the engineers and they signed off. And so there's a lot of different nuances with process from

Rishi Srivastava (31:30)
you

VERONICA WHITESELL (31:34)
company to company, I think they do a better job than oil and gas in tracking costs. But, I mean…

There's, there's so, so, so, so different. You're utilizing a ton of union labor on most of the sites we're on because of the inflation reduction act and that's starting to fade out. So I think you're still going to see, because these guys now have, you know, five or six years of really good experience on these installs, you're going to continue to see the union side. So you don't see that as much in pipeline. You see guys that work in areas together, they know their job. have a mech tech and ops tech and ENI tech, and they all just go in.

it's like clockwork and they're just smooth and everything works. Where, know, you know, or even like a CNN crew that is installing a huge new pipe rack, like brand new whole deal clockwork. You go into renewables and every time one of these big projects starts, it's all new folks. Some of them have worked together on other projects, some of them haven't. And it's just different.

It's not really bad or good, it's just very different.

Rishi Srivastava (32:39)
Yeah. 30 to 45 and sometimes as long as 120 day payment terms in renewables. How do you actually finance the gap between paying union, cruise, overhead weekly and getting paid quarterly?

VERONICA WHITESELL (32:55)
This is always a fun subject. This process has been very interesting for us. It's going back to knowing your numbers and so you can figure out how to stop playing the game of robbing Peter to pay Paul with your cash counts. What really made the difference for us, I kind of said earlier, is that

My husband and I, did not take a paycheck from ourselves for the first two years. And everyone says that. And then usually everyone who listens to a podcast that, you know, that said, they're like, how did you live? Well, when I say we didn't take a paycheck, I mean, we didn't like our bills, our home bills were paid. But before we started this, we sold off as much things and items as we could. Yes, we have a mortgage. We have 12 acres on that mortgage of the, the personally mortgage with the 12. There's 12 acres.

acres actually there's probably more than that that the business rents from us that is you know insured that's a laydown yard it's all over there it stays over there so it helps pay for that and you know you get down to the very very small things that you need you're eating hot dogs you're putting stuff in the air fryer you're you know

You, like I said, I took a sales job for a little while to help float some of our personal stuff so we could keep reinvesting back into the company. Our biggest thing with being paid, I figured out very early on, I wanted to know who the heck we were working for. We didn't just bid, we do not, and we still to this day will not,

If I can't find information about you, like your company or your… who you've worked for and bring references to the table, I'm not working for you. I'm not even gonna bid. Because if you are not out there, everybody and their brother is on social. You know, Dynamite…

Rishi Srivastava (34:39)
Hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (34:46)
I'm on social, Dynamite has a presence on social, we're getting to the point to where we need to hire someone to help us do some content, more content. It's hard for us and we'll get in that in a minute on the social side but.

If you as a company, if I can't find you and you don't have some sort of like a website that shows what projects you've done, you know, all the things, it's just a generic deal. And I call my union reps. If I call people I know in the industry and like, Hey, have you heard of this? Have you, can you tell me anything? And then usually I've had a, I've had a FINRA license in the past. So usually I have some avenues I can jump on and I can see if you have any liens against you, your company, if you have, you know, if you haven't

pager bills on time. I've got some friends that can dig up a lot of any kind of lawsuits and you know stuff that's out there for the masses. I'm very very I'm very good at finding information. So that's how we vet and I actually do some vetting for other companies as well when they're like we can't find much on these folks who are they because usually it's a subsidy of a subsidy of a parent company.

Um, and in renewables, especially solar, especially in state of Illinois, have to be very careful with the community solar companies. A lot of them are fly by nighters. Um, we don't do residential work of any kind. We only do large scale utility. Uh, we will, we would do small stuff. And when I say small, I'm like five megawatt ish. We're used to working on, you know, 175, 200 megawatt and over. Um.

as a company, you've got to be on it. You've got to be on your accounts receivable. If we don't have a contract in our hand or a PO and it is legit and there are lien waivers involved, we don't go and start work. That's not how that's always been in past, but that's how it is now. you have to make sure that you legally can be on that property. You can't just.

You know, someone say, Hey, just need you to come do the work. Come do that. We'll figure out the pay and stuff after that is never a good idea. that comes back to us having that integrity and continuity. I can't have integrity and continuity. If I can't get you guys to do your job, if you can't get a contract and a price, you know, whatever we bid either on a contract or a PO, if you can't get that to me before we start work, you need me to start work. How do you think that they're going to pay you?

I mean, that's…

That's how that works. So you have to be conscious of just because you're going to work doesn't mean that you're being, you know, profitable.

Rishi Srivastava (37:21)
Actually this month for the first time I placed one of the accounts in collection. It's kind tough doing that and it doesn't feel good but you have to know that sometimes people are not gonna pay you.

VERONICA WHITESELL (37:26)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, to me, comes down to communication. We did some work. We run a semi and a low boy, and it's mostly for moving equipment on these renewable sites back and forth. Because I can't just walk over a road with a huge, huge, huge excavator that's going to eat the road up. So we will jump pieces back and forth across the road, down the road, however big these solar sites are.

And so we do, we help out a couple of really good friends of ours that work in, they've got some like larger semi towing and like rec mediation, businesses around us. Cause we've got a couple of interstates close to us. And so we went to work. We, they asked us if we'd helped. had a big, there was a big fire and stuff on the interstate and we don't do a lot of interstate work. We will come and pick up equipment and leave. We won't help clean up because that's a whole other safety deal insurance.

all the things, but if it's completely shut down and diverted, we'll help. And so it was a very small bill, didn't care. It wasn't, it was kind of all hands on deck. If you've got something that can help, could, we could really, really use the help, especially working with, you know, the county police and stuff like that. We don't mind. And it, the bill, it was like very minute, tiny, tiny minute bill compared to, know whatever bill they had.

And so the friend who had called us for this job, he didn't actually wasn't the actual owner of the job. He was helping another, a tow company out and it was like all hands on deck. Well, they have yet to get paid and I know their bill is huge. We, and this was last September and we have yet to be paid and it was very minute and I don't even care, but they stopped communicating with us on it.

Rishi Srivastava (39:09)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (39:16)
And so the communication was, I'm like, hey, you know, you're 300 days late dang near, like whatever, whatever the amount was, I'm just throwing out numbers. I'm like, hey, like I'm just putting this in front of you. I'm sure you have not received payment from the insurance company yet. I get how, I know how tracking stuff works. Just let me know, keep, keep in touch. They completely like blocked our email, all the things over a very small, like less than $2,000.

And I'm like, listen, I'm not worried about payment. I'm not. But it's just a fact now that it's a principle of don't stop communicating with me just because I'm like, hey, I'm just keeping this up front because it's still from our books from 2025.

And so like if you're not going to pay it or if we want to figure something else out, I'll take something and trade and we'll do something else. It's not a big deal. I don't have to have cash, but it's just like they just stopped communicating. So I turned it over to 1099 and it is what it is. You know, like just keep communicating with me. We'll figure it out. I get, I understand how it works, but don't not communicate with me on stuff. So we will never, we will never help that company again because it's not about the money. It's about the fact that.

Rishi Srivastava (40:17)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (40:23)
they just don't communicate.

Rishi Srivastava (40:24)
Yeah, this sucks.

VERONICA WHITESELL (40:27)
Yeah, but anyway.

Rishi Srivastava (40:29)
You hold a Masters in Emergency Safety and Risk Management and an active PNC insurance license. IRA compliance, apprenticeship, prevailing wage, domestic content is essentially risk management bolted onto every job. How does that risk manager plus insurance agent lens shape your

IRA program and what's the part most contractors most underestimate.

VERONICA WHITESELL (41:02)
most contractors they they underestimate how easy that compliance is and mostly because they're already doing the work with paper or an excel sheet by hand yeah I've got a masters in emergency safety and risk so that's kind of it fits with the way my brain works on you're always looking at how does this hurt me how does this hurt me

Sometimes that causes us to be overinsured. But when you have to play in the seven million to ten million dollar ballpark on liability anyway, that is not easy to get by the way. You can't just like show up one day and ask for that. I had, I mean me being in that part of the business to begin with, I had a handful of people I called and I said, hey, what company

is gonna take this serious on a new construction. And so what we ended up having to do is I knew within the first six months of having just our business insurance that we were gonna outgrow it, they were gonna not renew us. Not because it was our fault or their fault, it's just we outweighed their risk appetite.

So I had started making phone calls to people I know, you know, that work for companies I know. And I said, hey, what does it take for you guys to take this? I'm like, we are serious about this. Like, I understand you have underwriting requirements and those have to be met. I get it. What do you need from us? Like we need some detailed resumes. Okay, perfect. And that was relatively all it took.

Rishi Srivastava (42:21)
Hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (42:21)
detailed

resumes from both from all shareholders. You know, they wanted to see some not all financials, but some financials that we were solvent, those kinds of things, which to me that makes I've done some underwriting and I still do some underwriting as well. That makes sense for a risk aspect that, you know, when you're when you're dealing with the amount of trucking, the amount of, you know,

wages and we don't even have that many employees like we really don't we have a handful of like really really really awesome guys and gals but when you're dealing with this much you know cash flow and everything else it's in the amount of liability like some of the jobs we work you have to have a minimum of five and that's yeah five million that is hard

Rishi Srivastava (43:03)
five.

VERONICA WHITESELL (43:07)
and the waivers of subrogation. just actually transitioned to a different workers comp, which is the first two years was really expensive because you're new. You don't have any history. I was fortunate enough that I started this S Corp in 2017. It didn't hold any assets or actually have any income or revenue until 2022. So every time I use it for something and I start a business, I will create

another one and shelf it because when it comes to insurance they don't care the amount of revenue you've made they care when it was started. ⁓

Rishi Srivastava (43:42)
Hmm, yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (43:43)
Yeah, so there's a thought. There's a thought process. Now you still have to, you can't just set it and forget it like a crackpot. You still have to do your annual report. You have to do taxes on them even if they're zero. So it does take some time and effort, but it saves you a ton of money and issues when you go to get your first insurance policy.

Rishi Srivastava (44:02)
Very well said. Next section is the unremembered hardships. Certified payroll for under 10 employees was eating about five hours a week in QuickBooks. Walk us through what those five hours actually looked like and what finally pushed you to migrate to foundation and payroll for construction.

VERONICA WHITESELL (44:03)
Yeah.

lot of F-bombs being dropped. A lot of oilfield talk. So I'm sure a lot of people have seen Land Man. Like I haven't even watched the second season, but literally like that's, that's legit oilfield. Like old roust about old greenhorn talk. And so there was a lot of really colorful things that would come out of my mouth.

It was not fun. It was all done, you know, pen, paper. We would, I would process payroll through QuickBooks. We had no way to job cost. and the nuance-y things were, was I had one, I have one employee that, most of our employees are journeymen for their particular union. I have one employee that we figured out how to float.

So depending on what PLA we're signed to on these IRA contracts, he does the exact same thing. Sometimes it's under IBEW as a welder. Sometimes it's under ops tech or under international union engineers, operators.

And so not on the same job, but there was jobs where we were three hours apart on two big jobs we were on. And some days he would go over here and weld under union operators. And some days he would go over here and weld as IBEW. It depended on the contract that those owners of the infrastructure and the prime contractor signed with unions, if he could do that.

And so that was hard to do, hard to figure out, hard to read in their CBAs, their rules or regulations, their pensions, how all of that worked with them. their business managers, like, you can't do that. And I'm like, I am, I called all of the funds. I called the international, like we're working within the scope.

Now it's not so much like that because we've got so many jobs that now we've got so much, you know, in with these unions that we're really good with them. They're good with us. We're getting our guys in the spots they need to be and they stay in those spots now. But the, you know, just getting all of the SDLL sheets, our certified payroll reports,

You know, when we transitioned over to P4C, it took me about, oh, probably, I was actually going through a NECER, NECER for the IBEW. They always do an audit on their first year contractors.

They'll usually give them, we've been in it for like 18 months. And we weren't even signatory at the time, but we were paying in because of the contract we had signed with the PLA. And so we were going through payroll audit. So I was pulling stuff by hand and sending it to them. And that's what this firm does. They work in construction. They do audits for a lot of different union contribution funds and…

And so we were, I was doing that. I was actually having QuickBooks do a cleanup and an audit of our books because we were transitioning fully over to foundations. I mean, that was probably July. We were planning on going live in January. So we were working through P4C and doing all of that. It took me about six, eight weeks to get P4C up and going. And my gosh, it was like Christmas day, man. It was like, because payroll used to take me like five or six hours. Like it was all day thing to get things rolling, move.

seeing everything where they need to go, sent out. I then, with P4C, could do payroll in about 15 minutes, and it took me 15 minutes to send all the forms out, signed, and how they needed to be just to get them out to the right people. Is it expensive? Meh! Because it gives me like, I mean, it gives me how much time during the week back every week. Like, it's, you just can't get any better than that.

Rishi Srivastava (48:08)
Well, yeah.

done.

Right, right. You know, owning good tools, that's what they're supposed to do. Save you time, enough that ROI is there for you.

The $36,000 IRS bill from the 401k withdrawal where the fiduciary failed to withhold. Most people would never share that publicly. Why do you think this kind of story is so unrepresented in entrepreneurship narratives? And what's the lesson you wish someone had told you before that letter showed up?

VERONICA WHITESELL (48:50)
it's really funny. We talked about this because it's the first time that this is like out on the internet for everyone and Jesus to see. So yeah, right. So I told my husband, said, this is what's going to happen. He's like, you're putting that I'm like, yeah, yeah, I am because why not? man, people, this is so, this is so simple. People hate, like people cannot stand to feel vulnerable.

Rishi Srivastava (48:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (49:18)
Like they just, and there's, I hate to pick on grown, I call them grown ass men. I hate to pick on grown men because they're like mostly in that category. I have a problem with, I don't stereotype people, but I put them in buckets and it helps me kind of like figure out things in people. And it's a lot of.

It's a lot of business owning men who's like, no, I've always been strong. We've always been on the up and up. And I'm like, that's a lie. that's, know, Maury says that is a lie. Strong people don't share stories of their weakness, man. And in this case, what I wish I would have known is how money works.

know what you know you can take all the finance classes I wish my biggest regret in my entire life my entire life is I did not I just I decided to take a statistics class instead of an accounting class in college right you know how much time and effort and

baby fits, could have saved myself from throwing if I would have just known the basics and not had to take the last two years really learning accounting and job costing and all of those things when I could have, you know, paid a professor to kind of like do that hard thinking for me and but I mean

It's… The 401k thing was funny. It's still funny. It's not funny when you get an IRS letter, but you're just like, all you can do is laugh. And here's why. So I started working pipeline when I was 23. I had student loan debt like every elder millennial, right?

Rishi Srivastava (50:42)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (50:50)
Because if you don't go to college you're gonna be a nobody like that's that whole deal right and then when you get out no one wants to pay you what you're worth because you don't have any experience like yeah Like how do you get experience? How do I get a job? I don't get experience and vice versa and the whole debacle but So I came in as a 23 year old blonde girl

Rishi Srivastava (51:00)
Thank

VERONICA WHITESELL (51:11)
And I was kind of malady. I mean, you know, when you got a dad that comes from oil field, you learn to talk that talk. You don't necessarily know how to walk the walk, but you can talk the talk. And when you have a stepdad that was born and raised, you know, on a cattle, on a huge cattle ranch in Montana, like there's different nuances. So it's, you know.

I watched those guys at work the first probably hour of the day, the winter time, when there wasn't a ton of stuff that was going on, they'd play with their 401k. They'd play with how it was invested. They'd look up these companies and that and like kind of like, no, no, no, you want to do this instead of that and all the things. That's kind of how I really learned about how companies work with investments and finance on that side. So I made enough in about the first 18 months

of doing, of playing with that. And I didn't have it, I mean, I think I had like, I think I had like 15 or $2,000 to start with. And I made enough to, in about 18 months, that sitting down and doing the math, it made sense to, it made way more sense and gain to surrender my 401k, take the penalties, pay the taxes.

every and just have them hold all of that. And I would have enough to pay my student loans off that were on compounding 9 % interest. And it wasn't going to get any better. And there was a $600 payment that would go out the window, a monthly payment because Sally may go get her money. And so that's I did I did that thinking I did the things right. No, that's not worked.

Rishi Srivastava (52:46)
You

VERONICA WHITESELL (52:58)
I expected the company that was the fiduciary on my account to withhold all of the taxes.

and all of the penalties and I paid those when I did my taxes, all the things right? Wrong. They did not withhold any of the taxes. So I just took my W-2 and my little papers I had and said, here, you know, accountant, do my taxes. I didn't know how to check. I didn't know what I was looking for. I really didn't know what the heck I was doing. And so about 10 years later, bought

This was probably, right, right. Kind of about the time we were starting our business here. We bought a piece of property. And if you want, if you want to know if you owe somebody some money, you go buy a piece of property because that's gonna pop up.

All the things you're going to pop up, any kind of liens that might be on you or your business or even the business before or they've got the wrong name, you know, and they're confusing you with someone else. All of those will pop up when you go buy a piece of property because they're coming. And boy, did they, you know, my little I think it was like. I don't know, like forty five hundred dollars at the max on everything total, which I paid part of it in my in my penalties.

It turned out to be about $36,000, $37,000. And when you get slapped with that and like, hey, glad you own property now. We're putting the lien on it. I'm like, what does this mean? What is happening? Well, the best thing I can tell you is they're not taking your birthday away. OK, so but what a lien means from a federal organization is they can take it at any time that they would like.

They can put you on a payment plan, but you still gonna pay them really terrible interest rates and really terrible penalties every single month, even though you're on a payment plan. And the only thing that keeps them from coming and saying, hey, we're issuing, we're gonna take your place, is because you're on a payment plan and you are showing good faith.

Rishi Srivastava (54:49)
Wow.

VERONICA WHITESELL (54:58)
So on top of all of the new things with the business, we were scrambling and hustling to make that go and pay that completely off, make it go away. And there's no, hey, I want to refile. No, you have a three year deal where if you haven't, after you file, you have three years after that, it doesn't matter. You're paying it. It does not matter. You're paying it.

So that was, nobody talks about that. I know that there's so many that have had issues like that and no one wants to talk about it and be vulnerable. I laugh at it because it is what it is. you don't know what you don't know.

Rishi Srivastava (55:32)
and I really am thankful that you're willing to share that kind of story.

VERONICA WHITESELL (55:38)
And once you've been through that and once, I'll be honest, everyone's like, the IRS is terrible. Dude, the people that work at, the people that answer the phones and help you at the IRS, the people that answer the phones and help you at most state, you know, state regulators in offices, whether it's tax revenue, doesn't matter. They're actually really nice people and they want to help you.

Rishi Srivastava (56:04)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (56:04)
They're not just going to – you owe us money. They're not collections. I mean, they are collections agency, but they're trying to do whatever they can to help you because they are. And some of them have been there for 20 years and they're very good and passionate people. And they're very nice, very cordial. You know, you just, you've got to treat it's you made the mistake. So you can't be mad at them. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (56:28)
You spend 20 to 25 hours a week reading regulations, laws, and interpretation letters yourself on top of an executive MBA in progress, a master's in emergency safety and risk management, and an active PNC license. What put that habit in place? And what's the most useful thing you've ever pulled out of going to the source on a regulation?

VERONICA WHITESELL (56:37)
Mm-hmm.

– –

I'll be honest, the IRS deal kind of really led me down that little path. And I was kind of on that path beforehand.

I have read the entirety. I like to read OSHA findings. I swear I'm really fun at parties. But I like to read like the well explosion down in the Gulf in what, 2010. I read that entire, I was like, oh, I don't remember how many hours it was.

but I read it like it was a novel. And I mean, you know, the movie with Mark Wahlberg is great, right? But that is, they have a lot of the facts going in because they're storytelling. When I read rules, laws and regulations, my brain processes that as if it's a novel and it's storytelling. So for me,

Rishi Srivastava (57:54)
Mmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (57:57)
I'm not the greatest person at asking for help. I'm that person of like, why do I wanna ask you for help when I don't know where you got your information? I wanna be Miss Mary Wright. I wanna be right because I'm that person that I got a whole bag full of receipts and when you tell me I'm wrong, it's gonna be bad day for you. Like that's where I'm at and it's.

I think a lot of that stems from college. think a lot of that, because I mean, you know, I went to a liberal arts college and it was 99.9 % percent critical thinking of where did you get your information? How do you know it's credible? You know, how do you know that that is truth? Well, everything can be skewed no matter where you get your info. But if you think through it.

of hey, I did my due diligence, I didn't just read it as a timeline or something on Facebook. You know, if I see, like, I wonder if there's any, you levity to that. So I will go back and I will try to find a credible source, a white paper, a, you know, some sort of journal, some sort of something somewhere. Because Wikipedia is just put in there by people. Like that is not, no. And AI, you've to be very careful with AI because it'll lie to you. ⁓

Rishi Srivastava (59:15)
Yeah.

VERONICA WHITESELL (59:16)
Mm-hmm, right? I think attorneys

are figuring out don't use chat GPT for your research. But if you don't read it yourself, how do you know what it says? How do you know you're doing things the right way? And how can you, if someone questions you, if you get an IRS audit and say, hey, I've been doing this the way your interpretation letter said.

then they can look back and be like, oh, maybe we were wrong. Or maybe, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like, hey, we understand you did, like, I'm trying to do as much as I can to make sure it's correct. Every three letter acronym within the government always puts out an interpretation letter of the law that says, this is how we interpret what this says. Then the fun part is, is your company, whether it's your legal, you know,

suite or or the attorney you hire for you to read the contract or the the reg you have to decide what the interpretation letter means you have to interpret the interpretation

So that's where I like to play in the gray area and know, hey, some people are doing it this way. Some people are doing it this way. This is how I think it should be done. That's how so many companies get away with a lot of things anyway, because there's not a cut in dry black and white to any law.

to any law or regulation, you take it in front of a judge, a judge is gonna have a different opinion. You put four attorneys in a room, you ask them the same question, five attorneys are gonna come out and say that they're all gonna have five different opinions, even though there's only four attorneys, like it's weird. So you have to figure out what it means for you. And then you bring in industry best practice with that. And usually you'll be right.

Rishi Srivastava (1:00:57)
The last section here Veronica is burn the boats. Burn the boats came up during our planning call. What does committing fully to plan A look like in practice when cash is tight and your crew needs to make payroll on Friday?

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:01:12)
That means go all in, Go all in. You know, my, my, I'm an elder millennial. My generation comes from have a plan B to fall back on. Yeah, well, here's what happens with that. When you have a plan B to fall back on, you're always going to be stuck in plan B. So if you are not fully committed to plan A, which is what you wanted to do,

I mean, if you really want to do it, you're going to find a way.

If you're not fully committed to plan A and you, you know, you jump out of that boat, you're getting ready to storm the island, light them boats on fire. There's no way back. You can't go backwards. You can't, but that's not a good way. Like don't. If you burn the boats, you're fully committed. Like I have to do, like I have to figure this out. I have to win this. There will be, I will figure out a way. If you live your life that way, dude, no one can stop you. Nobody but yourself. You are only in competition every single day with yourself.

You can compare yourself to others. It will never work out for you that way. But if you are just being, you know, half a percent, one percent better than you were the day before, burn the boats. Forget about plan B. The only time plan A, B, and C work is if you know, hey, making, you know, this could put us between a rock and a hard place. And here's the decisions I want to be able to make. That's the only time you use A, B, or C. Burn the boats, man. Fully commit.

Rishi Srivastava (1:02:36)
I that.

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:02:37)
Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (1:02:39)
Dynamite is a husband and wife shop and you've talked about your thoughts on skin in the game. The idea that the business has to outlive its owners. How do you and your husband split the seats and what's the early version of building a real working succession plan for the business?

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:03:00)
That's a good one. I left pipeline because I was tired of the corporate BS I Apparently do like working on projects. I kind of got

I want to say I got drugged by that my husband drug me back into this, but he really didn't. It's we didn't set off for it to be this. We started working on heavy equipment, you know, on the mechanical side and it just kind of morphed into, I know how to do this and somebody's asked us to do this and all the things. My husband is really the brains and the skill behind all of this from from the start. You know, I'm just the one that navigates the paperwork behind the scenes. I'm the one that's like, hey, I know we need to involve this process. We need to create

our own process off of this because this is how this is industry standard you know I know how to job cost you know we need to put this into place blah blah blah blah

It's really exciting for me when he walks into a meeting and there's almost a sigh of relief from the company that he's meeting with because they know whatever their issue, they know he can figure it out. And that is like, I mean, and I'm not tooting our own horn, but since it's not my horn, I'll toot it. It's crazy when, and he's not, I mean, he's a very,

bearded manly guy who doesn't, he doesn't know how to take good old boys, you know, slaps on the back. Like, I'm the same way, I don't know how to take compliments at all. But it makes me really smile when he's like, I got a phone call today. And it started out like this. Hey, I hear you guys are the A team. Can you come to Tennessee? And I'm like, sure, you know, like.

Rishi Srivastava (1:04:34)
Hmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:04:39)
You know, I'm like that is he's like I never know what to say to that and I'm like just keep keep not hearing it Just keep not hearing it and keep doing what you're doing and so it's it's I'm it's really really makes me happy that he is shining and he is Do like this is his I call it our business is his business like I just help facilitate some things You know, I've done I've done all of this He didn't get to see a lot of that

and see kind of my end of it, but you know, I've done all of this stuff. I've lived and worked this life, you know, even like when I was a kid with my dad, going to some of the wells with him and working with some of that stuff too. you know, that's, I mean, we build it together, but it's really his and he is like, he is just shining in his own. He is the man.

Rishi Srivastava (1:05:27)
Mmm.

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:05:28)
It's exciting. It's exciting to watch. like totally 100 % deserved it. And the guys around him, like the guys around him, it's like, I feel like we need to be getting instead of like new trucks, we need to be getting like old like black A-Team vans. And just like rolling in, you know, with like, I just like want to give out some gold chains to the guys for Christmas or something, something, you know what I mean? Like, just like crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (1:05:47)
Wow.

What

about the succession plan?

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:05:57)
The – – succession we've put a handful of people that have kind of been our mentors together. We're formulating kind of a way for, I don't know if the employee owned is the way we want to go yet, but we want this to outlive us.

And so because other people depend on it and we don't have any kids to leave stuff to. And I guess there's a lot of other business people and I would love to hear from them on how they're not leaving it to their kids and they're not building it for their kids. Cause like I see a lot of kids get handed over stuff and then it just goes reeeep. Like I want, we want to build something. Obviously we're building something that's worth a legacy and it's sustainable. We want to keep.

honoring that and building it, building it bigger, you know, that in the end time, if we want to retire, if we want to, you know, I don't think we could just, I don't think I would be comfortable just selling it to the biggest, the highest bidder. If we ever did that, that's just like a maybe like back, back, back on the, I don't even know if I need to think about this.

But just like putting good people around us, be like, hey, how do we do this? What's the plan? And that might be a somewhat of a employee owned stuff eventually with a board, you know, around that we have the right people in the right places and it really can sustain itself. We're looking at all of those avenues right now. There's like nothing out there. There's not a plan out there that I'm like, yeah, I want to do that. That works. Or yeah, I want to do that. I want to do pick things from all of them and kind of put them together. Nobody does that.

Like I said, like a super far off forethought.

Rishi Srivastava (1:07:35)
Yeah, you still have a lot of to figure this out. ⁓ The last one here, Veronica, is for the construction owner who's where you were three years ago, knee deep in QuickBooks at 11 p.m. and second guessing everything, what's the one thing you want them to do this week? And feel free to make the pitch for Dynamite R &D.

VERONICA WHITESELL (1:07:38)
Yeah.

The one thing I want you to do is if you can, if you have the money to hire an accountant, go hire an accountant. Don't just hire Susan from down the street, cause she does some books for people. Go and sit down with at least five accounting firms that do construction, not that do taxes, help, you know, Brian with his t-shirt business that do construction, that do union construction.

sit down with them and say, hey, what does it cost for you to help me with my books? Help me get started. Teach me how to maintain them. Maybe you can maintain them. Maybe, you know, I can just put everything in and you can reconcile them. That is going to be I wish I would have done that earlier, but I'm kind of I want things done now. I want to done fast so I know all of the numbers and I can just start grabbing and I know where we're going.

We're past that now. You know, we're putting in processes and all the things. So the biggest thing is, CPA firm, get them on your payroll, get them on your retention, whatever you got to do to work with them. And if you, after three months, know, let's say you sign a year contract, make sure there's something in there that's like, hey, in three months, if I decide they're not working,

Rishi Srivastava (1:09:15)
Yeah, actually construction accounting is hard.

So a generic accountant from, let's say someone who's doing clothing accounting, they won't be very good for construction accounting.

I feel really thankful for someone like you and your company who's doing this kind of really complicated and difficult jobs. Thank you.

Veronica, thank you so much for coming on to the show. I had a great time talking to you.