How The "Gift Of Forbearance" Saved A $125M Company | Trevor Muir's Pathway to Peak Performance

I took this role on as the CEO. I'm going to be the guy that bankrupted SurePoint. My fingerprints are all over this. The bank had told us that we had 3 months to inject about $3 million, find a new bank, or they were going to foreclose on us. You're just like trying to figure out, how are we going to make this work? We're going to use this as a rally cry, and I coined it the gift of forbearance. And I couldn't sleep that night, I was so excited. And I got up and I literally went to every office. One of the things that was notorious in our industry, nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares. And I'd heard a lot and I was like, you know what? I want to prove that caring is a competitive advantage in life, in business, and certainly in our industry. What if we build an organization that the whole purpose of it was to empower people and improve lives? Like, what if that was the reason we exist? And we did that by caring more, and we went all in on it.

Trevor Muir, welcome to the Pathway to Peak Performance. So great to have you in, my friend. Thanks for coming all the way from Edmonton, Canada. Yeah, Alberta, Canada. You just hopped on the plane, flew right down here. No big deal, right? Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you for having me. When we chatted the other day and you said there was an opportunity to come down and meet you and be a part of this thing, I was like, I'm getting on the first flight basically. So, yeah, such a fan of yours and, you know, the work that you've done, I think, is just phenomenal. Thank you. I think it's the story that people really need to hear at this time, and it's super important. But hey, before we get started, what's your charity? Uh, Little Warriors Foundation out of Edmonton. They have a ranch in Edmonton, and they bring in young people who have gone through sexual abuse, and they're doing phenomenal work up there. I think it's something really, really important, and I'd love to support them. Oh yeah, well, we'll definitely put their information in the show notes, and all the proceeds from the episode go to them from the views. Yeah, so we're super happy to help out with that. It's definitely a worthy cause, a good one to be associated with. Yeah, well, that's so cool. I appreciate you guys doing that on this show. That's like really fantastic.

Yeah. Well, all right. So, one thing we're going to do is that's going to be kind of interesting. We got to be careful because you've had some caffeine this morning here in the process of doing that, so we're going to only have a little bit of this. All right. So, this is KetoneAid K2. This is a ketone; it's the beach ketone. It's the real deal. So this is like the Ferrari or the highest grade of any product in the market. And what you can see here is this has not been adulterated in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, right. So, what you're going to do is pop the top and put two capfuls in that cup and in this cup. And we're going to need some water over here to actually put into this so that we could kind of make it easy to drink. Am I going to run back to Edmonton after this? It's quite possible. What? How do Canadians say cheers? Cheers. Huh? That tastes good. Actually, that tastes really good. Oh my god, right. Yeah. You know what's so funny? You have another product called K4. It tastes what they say is like rocket fuel. Yeah, but it tastes like rocket fuel, but it's pretty good. This one tastes a little bit different. Yeah, this is tasty. Yeah, yummy.

All right. So, here's the deal. It is 10:21 and we are going to see how we feel in about 20 minutes. Okay. You may feel it happen a little bit faster for you since you've caffeinated. But reality is that if you start to feel very clear mentally and very focused on what you want to say, then you know it's working for you. After that we'll go for a second workout. Okay, sweet. Awesome. All right. So you have an incredible story. You start off in a small town in Canada and you built something pretty amazing. So take us back. Let's talk about this company that you and your buddies put together.

Yeah, well, thank you. So I grew up in a really small farming community in northern Alberta called Elworth. I think I was sharing with you like the whole town had about 15 people in it at one time, and one family had seven or eight kids. So that kind of popped up the population, but the farming community around it was a few hundred people. I moved there in grade three and there were nine kids in my class from grade three to grade nine. And so you come from a small community like that, you get to understand the importance of community for sure. Fast forward, I graduated from high school, got a trade, I became an instrumentation mechanic, which is a certified trade in Canada. And in my 30s, early 30s, I ended up starting SurePoint with nine other people. All of us were friends, all from small communities in Grand Prairie. Grand Prairie is a city at that time of about 25,000 people. And we had a guy that was older than us who kind of was the leader and he helped pull us all together.

But it was kind of a Cinderella story in reverse, and then another Cinderella story. We started it in 2003. So 10 owners, 10% each, all friends, which everybody told us was a recipe for disaster. And there were some challenges for sure, but the first five years, we went from 4 million the first year to about 55 million in 2008. And the reality is, you know, we're a bunch of farm kids, tradespeople. Like, we didn't have a lot of business acumen. So, the first year we did 4 million, we're like, hey, at the end of the year, we go do a P&L review and look at how the year was. I certainly didn't understand it, and most of us, I don't think, did. But we had to do a budget for the next year. So we grab some beers and we go out into the bush and bring our campers, and we sit around a campfire and have a few beers. And we said, "Well, let's do 8 million next year." And we did 8 million. So, the next year we went back to the same place and said, "Well, let's just do 16 million." And we did 16. And eventually, in 2008, we had $55 million.

What's crazy about this story is people say, "Okay, well, $55 million, so maybe you're selling some sort of product, right?" And there isn't, but you're doing services. This is a totally different game. Yeah, totally different. I mean, you just need so many bodies because you send people out at 100 bucks an hour. We did have a material component to it, so about 30% of the 55 million would have been parts, like electrical parts and components like lights and whatnot. But 70% of that is two guys in a truck, or two technicians in a truck going out, and you charge them out at 1,500 bucks or 2,000 bucks a day combined. So you need a lot of bodies to hit that kind of revenue.

How many employees were there at that point? At that point there was probably about 200, 180 probably. Yeah, because when we hit later on when we really scaled it, we got up to about 400. So yeah, we were about 180 people I think in the company. 180 people, $55 million in a services-based industry like oil and gas primarily, and so tradespeople, electricians, and trucks going to these remote sites fixing pump jacks and working on controllers and different things for well sites and gas plants. Yeah, you've got a lot of natural gas up there, a lot of oil up there, right? A lot of both, yeah. I think the third largest oil reserve in the world and a lot of natural gas is in the area that I grew up. It's predominantly natural gas. And so it was a natural thing to go from the farm. I was going to be a schoolteacher, and I decided that I didn't want to go back to school for a year. And then I got into a trade and I started to make some really good money. And then I was like, yeah, I probably just keep doing this for a while. And that was sort of the evolution, and the trades have been amazing to me. And in the gas industry up there, it's just, I mean, it's the industry. So you can go right away and you can start making some good money, and you know, we were able to turn it into something really amazing.

We got to take a second to give a shout out to Mike Rowe. You hear this, Mike? Another guy in the trades making it happen. Yeah, no, that's awesome. Thank you. So, in 2008, we were about to 55 million. We started to get some attention from a lot of private equity money at that time. Oil was going like this, and so we started getting attention from a lot of different buyers and private equity groups. And we ended up doing a deal with one out of Chicago, March 2008. And we were talking about earlier, a few months later the economy, like the oil and gas industry, crashed hard. So we sold at a really good time for us. You came in hot. Yeah, we did. And so we sold 60% of it, so we still had a significant amount of our money tied up in it.

I don't think anybody contemplated what would happen if you give a bunch of farm kids some money, you know. Like what had built us was our culture. We didn't talk about culture, but we worked, and we worked every day. I was still in the field lots, and we'd show up in the mornings and we'd help our technicians load their trucks, and we'd have a Halloween party and a lobster fest and a Christmas party, and all of us were all there. And after we got a lot of money to us, most of the partners, you know, they went and bought cows and they bought more farmland and started to disengage. And I don't blame them. I mean, it was hard to get to where we got to. But what happened was the company started to—our revenue continued to grow from 2008 to 2012. We went from 55 million to 92 million.

What was, I'm just curious, I mean, like everything else is in flux. How did you guys manage to do that, you know? I don't know. We expanded into different areas. We got outside of oil and gas; we went a little bit into mining. We went into an area that was heavy in oil. So the revenue was going up, but our margins were getting worse. So we were chasing more work, and we were expanding and adding more people, but we weren't making money. And so I think growth is easy, to be honest with you. If you'll grow a company and you don't care about making money, it's really easy until you're bankrupt. And so the growth was not the problem. Getting work, the industry is huge. Like it's a multi-billion dollar industry. So to get $100 million out of it is a challenge, but to do it profitably was the real issue with us. And so we hit 92 million, but culturally we're disintegrating, and we didn't have the systems and processes to really support it. We didn't have the business acumen; like, we're tradespeople trying to run this company. They had brought a CEO in from the outside, very visionary, and I think that helped kind of push us some.

But in 2012, I get a call. I was actually leaving the company. I had given notice to our CEO and CFO, and I gave them 3 months' notice, and I had moved to a new area. I moved from Grand Prairie to Edmonton, Alberta, and I planned on being there for 1 year because my father-in-law was dying. And so he was in a coma for a few months, and I said to my wife, "Let's just move here." And I told my partners that I would find a way to make a living for the year to pay my own way, but I wanted to come back to Grand Prairie, so I didn't want to sell out. And I ended up moving to Edmonton, and I'm back in on the tools. I've got a tooled-up service truck, and I'm working everywhere but Edmonton, so I'm not home anyway. So I was like, man, I might as well have stayed in Grand Prairie and been with my wife at night.

Anyway, so I'm driving around in this area called Nisku, and that's where the Edmonton International Airport is. It's one of the rig building capitals of the world. And so I'm driving around there and I'm like, man, if I want to be home at night, I have to find a way to make money in rigs. And I'd never been on a rig. So I'm hitting up these rig companies and they're all like, hey, nice guy, but you have no rig experience. And one Friday afternoon, kind of feeling sorry for myself because I can't find any work locally, I call my buddy and we go for some beers to a restaurant in Joey's. We're in a lounge and I go into the bathroom to wash my hands—and I'd had quite a few—and there's a guy standing beside me and I said, "Hey man, how's it going?" And he goes, "Pretty good, mate." And I said, "Mate," I said, "where you from?" He said, "I'm from Australia." And this was December. It's freezing cold in Canada in December. And so I said to him, "Man, go home and come back in July. You're going to freeze to death." And he laughed. And we're walking out of the bathroom and I said to him, like seriously, "What are you here for?" And he said, "Oh, I'm with a small drilling contractor out of Australia, and we're looking to buy some drilling rigs." And I'm like, "Oh, buy some AC drive drilling rigs." And he said, "No Canadian company is going to sell a small Australian company an AC drive drilling rig." So I said, "We'll build you one. I'll help build you one."

And so I ended up, me and my buddy, ended up at his table with him and his colleagues from Australia. And all night they're talking about onshore rigs and offshore rigs and jackup rigs. And I'm like, "Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome." And at the end of the night, one of the guys who was with this guy I met in the bathroom—I thought he was the senior guy—he said, "Hey mate, uh, what's your rig experience? You haven't talked about rigs at all." I'm like, "I've never been on a rig in my life." So, I just spent 5 hours convincing him we'd build them state-of-the-art drilling rigs. And I said, "I'll never lie to you, drunk or sober, but I know some people, like, we can pull this off." And I met them the next day for lunch. And long story short, I ended up flying eight weeks later to Australia and we signed a $21 million contract to help them build three rigs. So all of a sudden, moving back to Grand Prairie was not an option for a while because we had a few years' worth of work. So we ended up hiring about 80 people and getting a shop and doing—we didn't actually build the rigs, but we did all the electrification and the programming and everything for it.

And so fast forward, it's 2012 and I am in Australia for the last time I think with SurePoint, and I had already given notice and I went over there to tell them that I wouldn't be coming back probably. And I get a call from one of the board members and they're like, "Hey Trev, you know, things aren't going very well at SurePoint and financially it's not doing very well." And I was like, "No, I get it." I said, "It sucks right now. Like the culture sucks, too." And they said, "Well, we think we're going to make a change to the CEO position." And I said, "Hey, great guy, but probably necessary." And they said, "Well, we want you to take it." And I was like, "No, absolutely not." I said, "I gave notice. I only have four weeks left." And they didn't know that. And I said, "I'm a tradesperson. Like, I don't know how to be a CEO of a $90 million company that's in trouble."

I ended up flying back home a few days later and I said to my wife, "Oh, by the way, they offered me the CEO role." And she was like, "Whatever you do, do not take it. You have a plan. I'll never see you again. I know what this means." So, I jokingly tell people the reason why I took it is because she told me not to, but that's not entirely true. A couple days later, the board called me again and said, "Hey, you know, we really want you to reconsider. We believe you're the right person." And I went home and I told my wife they offered it to me again, but I'd already turned it down. And she was grateful. And then, but she said something to me that night just before I went to bed. She said, "Look, I don't want you to take it." But she said, "How will you feel if you don't?" And I said, "That's what I'm struggling with."

In 2008, when we sold the company, I was so grateful because it changed our life financially, but I felt like we'd missed something. And she knew that, and I had talked pretty openly about it. I was like, the day after the acquisition, the day after we got our money, 10 of our lives changed, but we had 250 people at that time, and nothing changed for 240 of them. They woke up the next day and had the same life they did the day before. And the only thing they could hope for was the new owners treated them at least as good as we did. And so here we are in 2012. The culture had disintegrated. And I said to her, if I leave, I'll always wonder if I could have made a difference. There are so many people who quit really good jobs to come here. And many of them did because I told them we were better and we were different. And we were, and arguably we were worse. So I end up taking the job.

And 10 weeks after I accept the position, I'm at a meeting with one of our clients in the morning on a Thursday, and my phone was blowing up from one of the board members and our CFO. I step out to grab a coffee, and I open my email first and there's a letter of forbearance from our bank, and I was like—I didn't know what forbearance was. I open it, and it was clearly bad. And so I called our CFO and he said, "Yeah, they pulled $400,000 out of our bank account and froze our line of credit, and we have to make payroll in 40 hours-ish, 48 hours maybe." And here I am going, "Oh my god." Like now I took this role on as the CEO. I'm going to be the guy that bankrupted SurePoint. My fingerprints are all over this. So my ego was flaring terrible and it was all about me, and I'm feeling sorry for myself.

With the help of the private equity, we had got the bank to give us enough, extend our line enough to make payroll, but we were operating on a $7 million line that we were bouncing off the top of all the time. All of a sudden, even with what they gave us back, we were only at 6.2 million. And so, all of a sudden, I had to learn a lot. I'm like, how did we get in this position? We'd never missed a payment, interest or principal. Well, we broke covenants. I didn't know what covenants were. And so I had to learn about covenants and banking agreements and working capital. And so I got a crash course in business coming from a farm kid tradesperson. All of a sudden I'm, you know, I'm a CEO of a company that's in trouble. I kept most of it to myself, and I'm laying awake at night agonizing. I'm waking up and I'm sick. I'm like, I don't know how we're going to get through this.

And I woke up on a Tuesday in the middle of the night. And instead of being scared and full of anxiety, I was like, wait a minute. I got inspired. I was pretty excited when I took the CEO role. I didn't know much about business, but I knew that one thing that made us special was that we had an amazing culture. We didn't talk about culture; we just cared a lot. And I was trying to find a way to get us to rally. And I woke up on Tuesday night and I was like, wait a minute. This forbearance is exactly what I've been praying about, praying for. We rally around crisis better than any company in the world. And I was thinking more about when someone's kid was sick in our company and they had to be in Edmonton, four or five hours away from home for a long time. Our employees raised $8,000 in a day for one of those families. And I could tell you a hundred stories like that. And I was like, we rally around crisis. Awesome. There's no bigger crisis than this forbearance. The bank had told us that we had 3 months to inject about $3 million, find a new bank, or they were going to foreclose on us. And I'm like, well, no one's gonna put $3 million into this business when we're going broke. It's hard to find a new bank when you don't have any money.

And so I was like, we're going to use this as a rally cry. And I coined it the gift of forbearance. And I couldn't sleep at night. I was so excited. And I got up and I literally went to every office in our—like, I went to all the branches. I got in front of all the people. I went out in the field to where our job sites were and got in front of our technicians. I met people in their little towns for coffee with their spouses. And I basically told everybody the exact same thing. I said, "Hey, first of, you know, I'm Trev, new CEO. Most of you know me and I'm way over my head, so I'm gonna need a lot of support." And then I said, "I'm really sorry that we screwed this up. Like, we didn't mean to. And those of you who were here in the beginning know how awesome it was. And I know culturally it sucks right now. And I'm going to do everything I can to try and help that and change that." And I said, "And then the last thing I want to share with you all is last week we got put into forbearance. And I can't explain it very well other than to let you know that it's bad and things are going to get way worse before they get better. And I want you all to know so you can go and make the best choice for you and your families. If you need to leave, we understand. However, I've decided to stay, and I'm going to ride this thing out, and I hope you stay. And if you stay, I have no idea how we'll get through it. I just know that we will. And I promise you on the other side, we'll build a better culture than we've ever had." And almost everybody stayed.

And then I went to our vendors, and I pulled our vendors in one at a time and told them the story. "Hey, the reason we're not paying you is because we don't have any money because we don't have a line of credit, and we're going to need some help. You have a choice to make now. If you help us, we'll get through this, and we're SurePoint—we always find a way and we will pay you. And on the other side, if you help us, we'll be true partners to you." And most of them helped us. And then I went to some vendors and said, "Hey, can you quick pay us and can you give us more work?" And our clients stepped up. I found out how much influence some of the ladies can have in some of these offices who've been in multi-billion dollar corporations. I went to this one lady, and I'll call her Sue, and I took a 1.3 million invoice to her, and they're a multi-billion dollar national company, and I said, "Can you pay this in two days?" And she's like, "Has it been approved?" I'm like, "No." And so I got the name of the guy in Houston that would need to approve it and I'm like, "I'm going to call him. You work on it locally if we can pull this off, and you can have a check ready for me. I will come and pick it up on Friday, and I'll bring flowers and coffee for every woman in his office." And so we pulled it off. So I literally had boxes of flowers and coffee and donuts. And that became a monthly thing. Every time I'd go get a check, I'd show up with these things. But I started to see that—I've learned this—give people permission to do the right thing, they will always do the right thing.

And so we started to get this support internally and from our clients and our vendors. And one of the things that was notorious in our industry from the technicians and the people who work for trades companies was they would say, "Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares." And I'd heard a lot. And I was like, "You know what? I want to prove that caring is a competitive advantage in life, in business, and certainly in our industry." Yeah, you know what? Let's just make sure that people are clear about exactly what you just said. Caring is a competitive advantage. Oh, and it is. And when I finish the story, and you know it, I mean, I have proven it without a doubt, at least to myself, that caring truly is a competitive advantage. And we had evidence of it because here we were—like, really, companies don't get through where we were. And we've had other CFOs come in and say, "Wait, no, no, I don't even know how you got through it."

I love to say this especially to my friends who are MBAs or if I'm speaking to a group of MBAs, I'm like, I had a major competitive advantage. I wasn't smart enough to go to Harvard and get an MBA, so I couldn't go to the book. The book would say you're toast, and lay off a bunch of people, and don't tell vendors you're in forbearance, and I was like, I'm just winging it here. Like, I got to go with my gut on this. And so that ended up, I think, being an advantage. So we went all in on culture and we said we're going to rebuild SurePoint on a foundational core value of caring, and the things that we did to help people in our company and our communities would bring tears to your eyes. And then we actually came up with a core purpose, and that was to empower people and improve lives. We're like, we're an electrical instrumentation company, and I would say that's what we do and we're pretty good at it, arguably some days better than our competitors, some days not. We're human beings. But what if we build an organization that the whole purpose of it was to empower people and improve lives? Like, what if that was the reason we existed, and we did that by caring more, and we went all in on it?

And so we get through forbearance and we find a new bank—and the private equity group helped a lot with that—and we're starting to get stabilized. And then 2015 hits, oil crashes again. We were positioned; forbearance saved us. Like, all of these things that seem negative ended up being the best thing in the world for us because we were at a place where we were shrinking down. We had fired some clients. I knew that we needed to go from 92 million to about 65 million or 70 million with the line of credit we had. And so we were actually shrinking the company. 2015 hits, most of our competitors were like growing like crazy. We were shrinking at a time when the industry was good, to stabilize. So we were actually positioned well for it.

So, we came through that well, and in 2018 I got a call from the private equity group and they said, "Hey, Trev, you know, love you and SurePoint, but you're the last business in Fund 2." And I think they were on to fund five. "We got to, you know, we're going to do a SIM and we're going to list SurePoint." And I was like, "Ah, thank God." You know, because my plan was to leave when they sold, and I had this really sweet exit clause in my contract. And so, the rest of the afternoon, I'm keeping it to myself. I go home and tell my wife that night, "Hey, they're going to sell SurePoint and I'm going to get a check and do something else." And she was pretty happy.

The next day I woke up and I was like, "Huh?" So, I said to her, "Hey, I have an idea. I'm going to approach some people and see if they want to buy it back with me." And so, that meant we were giving up our change of control clause. And I'm like, "Instead of getting some money, we're going to have to put some more into this thing." And that was not popular. But she supported me. So I went to 15 people on the team and I said, "Hey, would you like to buy SurePoint back?" And these are young people, late 20s to 40. And they all said yes. And I said, "All right, I'll do it one more time with you all, but under one caveat: you have to be open to us turning this into an employee-owned company." And they all said yes. And we just couldn't do it right at the beginning because it was way too complicated. So 15 of us, with the help of a private equity group out of Alberta and an individual investor, bought SurePoint back in December of 2018.

And so we leveraged it pretty hard again to buy it back. 2019 was the year of stabilizing, and our revenue was about 55 million again. We'd gone from 90 to 45 to 55, but we were making some money again. And 2020's coming—great year. April of 2020 was supposed to be the biggest month we'd ever had in the history of SurePoint. And we wake up one day and the world stopped like two weeks before we're going to the month. COVID hit, and all of a sudden like nobody knows, nobody's ever faced anything like that before.

I ended up in isolation for 21 days away from my wife back in Grand Prairie. I had gone to a funeral. My mother-in-law had gone in for a cancer operation, lung cancer. She was getting out of the hospital the next day. I'd gone to a funeral and I had a sore throat and runny nose. They couldn't check for COVID yet. And so I actually went to Grand Prairie so that my wife could be with her mom, and I'm locked up for 21 days in there and the world is falling apart. I had the opportunity to sit on lots of virtual peer groups and TEC and boards and different forums, and everyone's trying to figure out, how do we get through this pandemic? And there was a common thing, and it made sense. It was logical, and it was: cut expenses, cut costs, conserve capital. Well, in our business, it was people. That meant we had to let a lot of people go. And so, we spent about 2 weeks and we came up with a list, our two VPs and our CFO and I. And on a Friday morning, we finalized this list and we're like, well, Monday we're going to start letting people go.

And Friday night, I called our VP and our CFO, our one VP, and I said, don't let anyone go. It was about 7 o'clock at night. I was like, "Don't." And they're like, "What?" I said, "Don't let anyone go." I said, "We don't have enough information to make a good decision right now. We don't know if this is going to last 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years. We don't know if everyone's going to die or no one's going to die. What we know is everybody is told to go and stay home, and they can't go find any jobs. They can't go to work. They can't go on dates with their spouses. They can't go for beers with their buddies. The kids can't swipe on Tinder; like, nothing is normal. We say we care. We are never going to get a better opportunity to prove it than right now." And I said, "So Monday, instead of letting people go, we also have to be prudent that we have to keep this company alive or try to. But on Monday, I said, we're going to have a town hall and we're going to tell everybody the truth. We have a playbook to go back to in 2013 when we were screwed. We went to the team and told them the truth and they helped us. I said, we're going to do the same thing."

So Monday afternoon we have a town hall and we say, "Hey everyone, we have a list of people we're going to lay off. We decided not to. We are going to run this as long as we can and try not to go over the edge of the cliff. If we see that we're going to, two weeks in advance, we'll have a town hall every week from here on in, and two weeks in advance, we'll let everybody know that it's coming." So we were pretty proud of the fact that we're doing this. We're burning through cash like crazy. But a lot of our staff, they're hourly employees and they only get paid if they go and fix something in the field, and there was nothing to fix. So they just had to hang out. Yeah, they literally just had to sit around, and during that period of time you're like trying to just keep it afloat long enough to get through. So you got to convince your board that you're going to do this, and tell me about that experience.

So, a few months go, like probably eight weeks go by, and realize 40%—well, more than that, 60 or 70% of our people aren't getting a paycheck, and they can go on this thing called CERB, which was a government subsidy basically for two grand a month. They're not getting anything with us. And so, we're starting to see people ask for some layoffs. And right at the exact same time, the Canadian government came out with a Canadian wage subsidy program. And basically, they would give you an offset. If you paid somebody, they'd top it up, and we found out quickly that we qualified for it.

And so I was back home at this time and I'm sitting in my office, and I literally write it on a napkin. I was like, "What if we did something that's never been done in the industry or the history of the trades in Alberta certainly? What if we guaranteed everybody a paycheck—like every tradesperson, everyone in the company?" And I was like, "So in Canada, you got a first year all the way to a journeyman: first, second, third, fourth year, and journeyman." And so I was like, "What if we guarantee every first-year apprentice $2,500 and every journeyman 5,000, and we'd stagger it incrementally by 500 bucks."

And so I call our CFO and I'm all excited about this, and I say, "Hey, what if we guarantee everybody a paycheck?" I tell him the plan and he goes, "You're a super nice guy, but we can't afford it." And I'm like, "But what if we can? What if we could find a way?" And he says—I said, "I need you to support me. If we can find a way, I need you to say you'll support me because I'm going to go to the board with this and they're probably going to tell me the same thing." And he said, "If we can find a way, I'll support you." So, I call the board members and I tell them the plan and they're like, "No, you can't afford it." And I was like, "If we can find a way." And they said, "Yes."

So, I got together that afternoon with 25 of our folks on a Teams meeting and I was like, "Hey, how do you all feel about, you know, we're keeping all our people and we didn't do layoffs like everyone else?" And everybody—I mean, we celebrated that right away. And I said, "How do you feel about us guaranteeing everybody a paycheck—like 2,500 bucks to five grand?" And everyone's like, "Yeah, that would be so awesome." And then I said, "Well, there's one problem. We can't afford it. The way that we're structured, we can't afford it." And then I said, "What I'm about to ask might be the most meaningful thing you ever do in your career, and everyone's going to have to sacrifice. It's not going to be fair; some are going to have to sacrifice more than others." And I said, "If anybody says no for any reason, we'll just believe we'll find another way. We'll never talk about it again. Like, this is a safe space." And I said, "Here's what I'm proposing. I'm willing to give up 50% of my pay for the duration of the wage subsidy program." And so, everybody knew what I made. So, I said, "If you're a dollar over that or you're $30,000 over that, you have to come down to that number."

And this is one of my proudest moments in my career to date, is those 25 people took 30 minutes to say yes and the sacrifices they were making. I mean, it is incredible. These are people in their 30s who have SUVs and mortgage payments and snowmobiles and kids—their expenses didn't drop—and the sacrifices they were willing to make. The managers gave up 15 to 20%. The two VPs and the CFO were in their 30s; they gave up 35% of their pay, and the rest of the organization gave up 10%. For 7 and a half months, you gave up 50%. Yeah. And so that comes up a lot, and I'm always like, big number, right? But I recognized early that me giving up 50% of my pay was less significant to my lifestyle than our shipper-receiver who was a single mom who was making 22 bucks an hour. We didn't take from those folks if they were under 25.

But I recognized like, I could feel sorry for myself or I could go and be a martyr and, "Oh, I gave up 50%." And it was significant. It turns out I hadn't saved any of my money. I was burning through some money. And yet I also recognized that the sacrifice that I was making, I was pulling some money out of savings. I had it. They were living on credit cards and deciding whether to buy yogurt for their kid or not. And that's kind of the mentality that we took into this. We come through. We almost didn't make it. Like, we're back to—we're back in financial trouble again. We're struggling.

We come through, and we got approval from the board. There was a competitor of ours that was smaller that was for sale in one of our product lines, and it was a good deal. It was owned by a private equity out in New York. Got a pretty good opportunity to buy it. We raised a little bit of money and we brought it in, and when we did that, we started to roll out the ESOP. We realized that we had the stability enough. We hadn't sold any more shares outside of the 15 people, but we had the program ready, but we wanted to make sure we were going to survive. So we get through it, looks like we're going to be okay, and we roll out the employee share ownership program.

And so we went from coming out of the pandemic, SurePoint was just under $30 million. We buy this company and merge it in, and we end that year at 46 million. We roll out the ESOP, and then the story got out about what we did, and all of a sudden we started attracting people like crazy. We hired 175 people in 9 months. We were onboarding people that had to onboard people, and our revenue went from 46 million to 98 million organically in one year, and it was chaos. All of a sudden, Jock, we're out of money again, but for a different reason. We're making money but our working capital's just shredded. And so now we're going to vendors and saying, "Uh, yeah, you know, we need your help again, but way different this time." And the next year we went 46, 98, 125 million, rolled out the ESOP, had about 80 people sign up for it immediately, which was impressive. And the momentum that they did.

In 2023 I resigned as the CEO, and I took a president's position for 2024, and I moved into a different role in the organization. One of the companies that we had bought, I went and stabilized it. And then in 2025, I worked part-time for SurePoint. In 2026, I resigned from the board in January of this year, and I'm no longer a part of SurePoint. Still a lot of money there, but you know, I'll get that out over some time. But I'm so proud of what we were able to do. And when I said earlier on that caring is a competitive advantage, you can do good to do good, and we proved that. We got through things that most companies don't get through, and not because I had the acumen from a business perspective on how to do it. People will rally, and if, as I said earlier, if you give people permission to do the right thing, they will always do the right thing. I believe.

Amazing. I mean, if you look at the timeline sort of in a linear sense, also some of the things that took place along the way. Yesterday, I heard somebody say something about like, you know, you run up against tough times and you'll think that's God punishing you. But in actuality, it's just God shaping you for the next thing that you're going to do. So, these things where you laid awake at night for a week, you know what I mean? Like, literally, I've done it. Yeah, so I know what you're talking about, where you're just like trying to figure out, how are we going to make this work? And sometimes you look back on it and you go, man, had I not had that experience, I don't know who I would be today. Nobody's perfect, right? But the reality is that you get an opportunity to do the best you possibly can. I love that caring is a competitive advantage is just so cool. You know, I've been following you for a while and I think, you know, your story is just really interesting and I think that what you've accomplished is really commendable. I'm sure SurePoint is doing extremely well and they're going to continue to do really well based on the work that you laid in. And that's kind of like the foundation that you see, unless somebody comes along and really messes it up, right?

And that's the biggest concern I have honestly, is as it gets bigger and as leadership changes and different investors come in, there's that risk, right? I hope—and you know, I hope and pray—there's really good leadership there, and so I know for the near future it's fine. One of the challenges that we ran into was I wanted to build a company that could be around for 100 years. And when you're dealing with private equity, they have a 3- to 5-year sort of timeframe, which is very, very necessary for companies to scale. And I have nothing but good to say about the partners that we had in the private equity, but there's sometimes a challenge there. And that was a lot of the things I had to sort of navigate as well. It's like, well, I wasn't worried about a bad quarter or a bad year; I was worried about surviving it so that we could get to the next level. And definitely were a lot of things I learned.

Something that you said about God shaping you—I believe this and I tell people this often when I'm working with young companies that are scaling, young entrepreneurs, or people who want to get into business. I'm like, any meaningful pursuit in life is supposed to be hard, and the more meaningful the pursuit, the harder it's supposed to be. And I think for two reasons. One, God is going to test you to see how bad you want it. And the other thing is he's going to put up these roadblocks and hurdles to help you become the person you need to be to accomplish the goal. Like, you can't get off the couch and go run a marathon. You just can't, so you have to train for it. And if you want to grow a company to $100 million, I didn't know how to do that. And so God kept putting these things in front of me that I had to overcome, A, to see how bad do you really want this, and B, to be like, you know, this is the person you have to become in order to do it. And I look at life that way.

Also to hear you be struck by the Holy Spirit and say the gift of forbearance was placed upon you, right? Yeah. And to have that where you say to yourself, "Whoa, this is like a huge opportunity," and you know that you went out there and you were straight with people, and you told them what they could really expect instead of, I think oftentimes, people don't really know what they're going to get, what they can expect out of anything, and it's tough for them, right?

Something I don't share all the time is two years prior to me becoming the CEO, after we had sold SurePoint, I had more money than I ever thought I'd have. I had a fancy acreage and horses and a barn, and I went and bought a sports car. I tucked it into my garage, and a beautiful wife and kid, close to my parents. But my life was unraveling, and for 3 years after we sold SurePoint, I ended up going down, down, down, and I ended up separated from my wife for a while. So, I'm in this fancy condo living all alone, and you know, people would ask me, "How are things?" And I was always open. I'm like, "Oh, good. You know, my wife and I are separated. Things aren't going very good at SurePoint for me. My son and I aren't talking. You know, other than that, things are really good, like really good."

And I was starting to drink a lot and binge drinking a lot. And one day I woke up on a bathroom floor, and that was the day that was the catalyst for change. The worst day of my life became the best day of my life, and it forced me to reach out for help. I think I said the first real prayer of my life—well, I know I did. I was like, "God, help me get help." And I was at a point where I tell people it was hell on earth. I was equally afraid to live and equally afraid to die, and I was so afraid I'd wake up the next day feeling the way I was feeling.

So I actually grabbed my phone—I'm fighting back tears. There are two moments in my life: one I'll get to, and that moment. And this was 16 years ago or 17 years ago. I lived in that condo for 3 months, and I can tell you every speck on the floor of that bathroom and the tile. I can tell you everything about that moment on the bathroom floor. And I prayed, and I went and grabbed my phone and I was like, "Here's how I'm feeling," and up came psychiatrist, psychologist. And I was too proud—my ego was so big. I was too proud to reach out to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but there was a life coach. So, I go down the list, there's this lady, she's a life coach. So, I'm like, yeah, life coach, I can sell that. And so, I reached out to her and all I said was, "If you have an opening sometime soon, I'd like to come and see you." And she got back to me 30 minutes later, and she had a cancellation. To get into somebody like that in Alberta, it takes weeks to months. She had a cancellation for the next morning. She's like, "Hey, I just had a cancellation. Would you like it?" And I was like, "Yeah."

So, I go in to see her the next day and she's like, "How are things?" I'm like, "Good. Wife kicked me out. Son's not talking to me. Get kicked out of the company I started. Otherwise, everything's awesome." And she was like, "You're not okay." And I'm like, "No, no, I'm fine." And she said, "You're not fine." And then she said, "I am worried about you and I can't help you. Do not leave this office. Promise me you won't leave this office. I'm only going to be gone one minute. Do not leave." I'm like, "Okay." So, she leaves. She comes back a minute later with this big guy. His name is Dr. Gans. Puts out his hand, says, "I'm Dr. Gans. Nice to meet you. How are you?" I said, "I'm good. She's got me freaked out, but otherwise I'm fine."

That moment changed my life. He talked to me for about 10 minutes. She pulled him out of a session to come and talk to me. And I started seeing him. He had me come in the next day; he made time for me. I started seeing him a few times a week to start with, and then a few times a month, and then once a month. And he taught me two things. One time I went in and he said to me, just out of the blue—I'd been in 20 sessions maybe—and I sit down and he says, "Trevor, how are you feeling?" And I said, "How am I feeling?" I just blurted this out. I said, "I've felt insecure and less than my entire life." I said, "I'm afraid of everything: success and failure." I said, "I've been sad a lot in my life, and maybe worse when I'm not feeling sad and I'm numb." And I said, "I'm lonely all the time. I'm lonely when I'm alone. I'm lonelier when I'm with my friends, and I'm loneliest when I'm with my family. And I don't know what the hell is wrong with me."

And I said that and I was like, "Oh my god." You know, when you say that thing to your wife, you're like, why did I say that? And I thought he was going to tell me, you know, you got to be more grateful and be a man, be strong. And I was raised that way—like, you know, you be a man. And instead—and I'm like, oh my god, my brain's firing—instead he looks at me and he goes, "Oh man, I get it. I get it." And he said, "If you would have told me anything else," he told me later, "I wouldn't have believed you." And he said, "I know how hard that is, and thank you for being vulnerable with me." I left that session feeling different than I'd felt my entire life, like, so different.

And I kept going to him, and one time I went to him and he said to me, "Next time you come in, I want you to come with a list of your priorities. List them one to 100 or whatever." So I went in with 20 things. I was back with my wife, so I had my wife, my kid, my mom, my dad, my sisters, friends, work, and then I had stuff under work—like work is number seven or something. I go and I hand him the list, and he says, "Good list." He says, "Trevor, where are you on it?" And I was like, "What's my list? I'm everywhere." He says, "Well, humor me." So he gave me a pen, and so I wrote my name and I put it in just above work. And the only reason I did is because I knew he'd call me out if I put it below work. But my brain was still like, "Work is how I support all of this." And I hand it back to him and he says, "Oh, that's interesting." He says, "Why didn't you put yourself first?" And I was like, "I'm not a narcissist. Who would put themselves first?"

And he said, "Yeah, that's interesting." He said, "Very few people put themselves first, and put themselves on the list, and even fewer put themselves first." And I said, "Well, I totally get that. Like, that makes sense to me." And he said, "Have you ever seen a champagne glass pyramid at a wedding where they stack them and they pour it and it pours perfectly?" I'm like, "Yeah." He said, "Have you ever seen them fill it from the bottom up?" I was like, "No." And he said, "Visualize it and tell me what you see." So, I closed my eyes and I'm like, "Well, you'd need more champagne because you'd spill it. The glasses would be sticky. It'd be inefficient. So, you'd need two bottles, and it would make a hell of a mess on the table." And he said, "Exactly. That's how you're living your life." He said, "Trevor, your priority list is your champagne glass pyramid. And what you're full of overflows to the next level and the next level. And so you come in here and say you want to be more loving, kind, patient, you know, more all of those things. And I believe you, but you're trying to do it from the bottom up and you keep running out of champagne."

He gave me permission to be selfishly selfless, to go out and start to do things that were good for me. If I truly wanted to show up as the best version of myself in the relationships that mattered most, I had to start to go and do things that were good for me. So, I started to go hiking and I started to do things, and it was starting to change my life. And my wife started to. And he said, "Every human being has their own champagne glass pyramid. You do, your wife does, your son, your mom, your dad. And you fit into each other's. And so if you truly care about them, you're going to go and do these things so that you actually become this person that overflows all of that stuff."

Two years later, I became the CEO of SurePoint. And I wake up on a Tuesday and realize, huh, if I try and figure this out on my own, we're dead. I had tried to figure out things from 18 to 40 on my own, and I ended up on a bathroom floor. When I reached out for help and pulled the truth, I didn't get mocked and criticized; I got help. I had somebody care enough, and a group of people care enough to rally around it. So, it wasn't courage; it was history that helped me in that moment. The moment on the bathroom floor prepared me to be the CEO of SurePoint at the time that I needed to be because I was like, I just had a parallel, an exact parallel. If I do this and I try to keep it to myself, we're going to die.

And so that, yeah, I mean that that's amazing, and man, I mean, what a personal thing to share, and that's an amazing story. And yeah, took tremendous courage. So thank you for sharing that because somebody is going to watch this show, but maybe many people, probably many people see that and say, "I'm not alone." Yeah, yeah, I hope so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the gift of having that experience and that ability to actually have an impact. We've learned so much from you already today about, you know, hey, how do you actually do things the right way? Tell the truth, show up, you know, take care of people, care about them, make sure that they're taken care of, cut when you need to cut, and also, when you're in trouble, reach out for help so that other people can help you. So it seems like it comes full circle because we sort of like look at how things have worked for you.

It does. And one of the things, I mean, I would get a lot of credit and a lot of praise for what SurePoint became and what we did. And so, I was one person in the ecosystem that was caring about a bunch of people, but I had the benefit of the whole bunch of people caring about me. Like, caring is a competitive advantage in all areas of your life, and it's two-way. Yeah, it's true. And it absolutely is. The more people you care about, the more people care about you.

And I always—so we got so much praise especially for the things we were doing in our communities, and our clients started to pick up on it. And we did care days, and every week SurePoint would go out, and every branch would get $2,500 to go and do anything in their community as long as it was spreading random acts of kindness. So we'd give out coffee cards. We have Tim Hortons up there; it's the Canadian icon drive-thru. And we'd give out free coffee cards. So we'd have we care shirts on SurePoint, and the whole team would go and we'd do this in the day. And we started to get like—people would stop and come and hug us, like people would cry because you give them a free coffee. And we started to do things for our communities and getting lots of praise, and our heads were getting big, and mine was too. You know, we're pretty awesome. And then I said to our team one time, I said, "Let's remember that kindness is self-serving, like, never forget that. It's great that we do it, but we feel good because we do it." I always say if you open the door at the mall for an older lady, I love it because when she walks by she's like, "Oh, thank you so much," and I get so much out of it. And really, so for everything I gave out, I got back a hundredfold, Jock. And I recognize how privileged I was to be a part of a group of people that cared that much about me.

Yeah, it's awesome. Well, man, you know what's interesting about all of this is that here you are also down to spend some time together collaborating on something that you built. And we're going to see if we can take it from where it is today to the next level. I don't want to talk too much about it because, you know, there isn't anything else that's been built like this yet. And the story behind it is so cool. I mean, having spent some time in the space and developing, you know, AI technology, and thinking about what's really going to work, and listening to so many people, reading so much, and all that stuff—the way you describe what you did is just so cool. I'm really excited. I think that the next meeting we go to after this episode is over is to go see the entire dev team and spend some time with them figuring out exactly the next steps for this incredible product that you've developed, which is just an honor. It's an honor and a privilege to actually get that time with you and to get to see what you've done.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was built accidentally out of necessity. And I won't go into it too much, but you know, one of the things was I had spent all this time at SurePoint, and I'm not organized—like, I'm not organized at all. I hate computers. Like, I ran the company from my phone, literally. Everybody would send things to me in a way I could look at it on my Galaxy, my Samsung phone. And so I'm very seldom on my computer; I really am very seldom on it now. But I always had an infrastructure of people, and I had an executive assistant, and I had a board, and I had all these people, and I realized how much I relied on them, even more than I thought I did. After, and I'm so disorganized, I just started to talk to AI and be like, "Oh..." And I would be more like, "Oh my god, like, I have this problem, I don't know what to do." And then it would say—I would ask, "Could you do that for me?" and it'd be like, "No, I can't." I'd be like, "Well, you're the smartest thing in the world. You have to be able to do it. Like, don't tell me you can't." And over time, it evolved into this thing.

So, now that I've left SurePoint, I'm doing some advisory work, some coaching, and I'm working with another technical trades company in the US that is looking at scaling, and I'm best friends with the founder. And I've also now been able to—because I do advisory work and coaching—I've been able to take this AI product into their organizations, but also for me to be able to scale my business as a solopreneur, and be organized and efficient and effective. I believe that AI can be used to help you make better decisions, and help humans with judgment, and help humans to do what they're better at, and give the stuff away. I think it's a long ways away, and I don't know if I would ever be super comfortable in a world where AI made all the decisions without human judgment. What I have been able to do is use it in a way to help me make better decisions. So, it ends with me, but the outputs are so good and the organizational part of it is so good. And so I'm so excited to be here to talk about that and really kind of dive into what it is, and you guys have so much experience with this. People ask me how I built it, I'm like, I don't know. I don't go on my computer; I hate my computer. But I love my phone, and it's just turned into this really cool thing. So I'm excited to meet with you and the dev team.

That's really cool. You know what, man? However you get there. Hey, you know, whatever it takes, whatever you did. What's really cool is it's a really amazing product, and it's going to help a lot of people from the solopreneur to, you know, the Fortune 500 company. And I think what's really neat about it is that this is where we apply AI. You're right, it's not something where we're letting it make all the decisions for us; it's something where, hey, we run scenarios through it and then take a look at what the outcomes could be. I think the vision that this product provides to somebody is so, so interesting and so cool because oftentimes when you're running a business and you have to make decisions in the moment when you're thirsty for an answer, right? You got to get this answer right now. You've got to make—you're not always seeing what the implications are, you know, or ramifications are, whatever you want to call it down the road. And I think that's what's so exciting about what you've put together.

Yeah. So second- and third-order consequences are hard to see, and I think it's Alex Hormozi who said make the best bad decision that you can because you don't know if a decision is good until after you make it. What this tool is doing is helping to make better decisions because it looks at second- and third-order consequences. And the other thing with AI, when I first started using it, I was just so frustrated with it as well because it will give you an output that just looks so smart all the time. And I would find that it was, until it wasn't, and then it would go—I'd learned so much about how it goes into hallucination and drift and all these things, and this has been built so that it doesn't do that. Yeah, you got to remove the sycophantic component from it saying, "Trevor, you're the best guy." Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, it's awesome. It's been so much fun, and it's really helped me to scale my business as a solopreneur again. And I'm excited to do some work with you on it.

Yeah, it's really cool to see you get out and hit the road and work with lots of new people and do sort of cool stuff. Last thing. So, well, we're in it now. We've been at it for about an hour. So, did you feel those ketones? I did, about 30 minutes ago. I was like, "Whoa." My energy spiked and my brain was going so quick but so clear. Yeah. And I actually feel so alert right now, but that has stabilized. I was like, "Whoa." So yeah, so cool. Gave some to a team member the other day and he said, "You know what's so wild is I just felt so dialed, just like I was just so clear. Everything was so clear." And I think it's really clear. I mean, it's obvious that our brain either runs on glucose or runs on ketones. And so, you know, if you're in dietary ketosis, then you're running on ketones. If you supplement—if you have a metabolically flexible diet and you supplement with ketones—you're giving it a certain type of fuel that helps you just sort of go to the next level, which is really awesome. It's incredible. I got to get some of that stuff. Oh, we're going to hook you up. Yeah, it will help me when I'm arguing with my wife. Maybe help you out, right? Or drink a art for that. You're that drink for the... Oh, brother. Thanks for coming. Hey, thanks.