Mike Kaeding, the CEO of Norhart, a pioneering $200M construction company, has a deeply personal and driven path in real estate. His journey began in the heart of a family business founded by his parents. Life took an unexpected turn when his father passed away shortly after he joined. Suddenly, he found himself at the helm, not by choice but by necessity, with the immense responsibility of leading a business in an industry he was still learning about.
Today, Norhart has grown from 80 to over 1,000 units, creating $230M in assets. This growth is a testament to his dedication to change, efficiency, and sustainability in construction. He is not just constructing buildings; he is constructing a better future, addressing the US housing affordability crisis with innovation and determination.
“You're not going to have the fortitude to get through it unless what you're doing is something you truly love and truly believe in. You need that inner energy to make it through. If you're just doing your job to make a bunch of money, when things get tough, it will be too easy to quit.”
- Mike Kaeding
Website: Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
Hello, and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is your host, Jason Abell, and I've got a special guest for us today. I think you all are really going to enjoy this one. When I saw Mike on my schedule, I'm like, man, I've seen this name before, but I'm not exactly sure, and then I went down a rabbit path and found out some really, really cool stuff about this guy. So, Mike Kaeding is our guest today. Mike is the CEO of Norhart, which is a $200 million construction company out of Minnesota and their commitment, their vision is something that I just find I've got a lot of questions about, but very compelling, which is they're committed to solving the US affordability crisis when it comes to real estate. So, we're gonna dive into all of those things. But Mike, welcome to the show.
Hey, yeah. Thanks for having me.
Dude, we open up every podcast episode with a question that has nothing to do with the affordability crisis of real estate in America and has nothing to do with Minnesota or where I'm from in Maryland but has everything to do with getting us started off on the right foot, and that question is this. As you and I engage one another today, Mike, what or who comes to mind that you're grateful for?
Hands down, it'd be my parents, they have such an unconditional love for me and my life. I've just, as I've come to get older, I've really come to respect and appreciate how deep that love really is. I know not everyone grows up in a household or a family like that, and I honestly wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't be where I am today without their love and guidance.
Yeah, thank you for that. The hands down part of what you just said, just really drove me right into your answer there. So, I don't typically do this, but I've got questions. What are some things from your childhood that led you to, as a grown man, now very successful person, reach back and say, yeah, hands down my parents. Like what were some, I don't know, a story or two or what was a thing or two that you remember that led you to give me that answer today?
Well, it's a mixture of things, you know, on the more challenging side as growing up, we lost everything as a family. In fact, my dad was kidnapped in Peru, but we didn't have a lot. And so, my dad was building apartment buildings at the time, and he'd bring me on site, and I would actually be out there working alongside him. In fact, there are pictures of me in a crib on construction sites. I'm not sure that's entirely legal, but that's my life growing up was well versed in that world. And that gave me a sense of work ethic and drive that I wouldn't have gotten if I wasn't in that kind of environment. But beyond now, I've seen later in life, you know, my dad's no longer with us, he passed away relatively young, but I have just seen the love for my mom in a way that is so selfless. You know, as a business we've been in tough points at times in our in our history and she has stepped up in a really big way and put herself at risk in order to help our business succeed, and that's a tough place to be when you are her age and I just so respect that.
The crib on the job site. I have this image in my head of that and it's a crazy image, by the way, and you and I share something in common and I didn't realize this until you just started speaking there. But my dad did a bunch of real estate development as well, and I've got a picture of myself. And I remember this, I was four years old, and I was sitting in one of the tractors, you know, with my hands on the steering wheel on this big job site. They were building a commercial building. And I felt that that was cool. But dude, you are in the crib. Come on. That's nuts. What more about your background, for people that have not heard of you, what about your background should people know before we get into the topics that we're going to get into today, Mike?
Yeah, you know, growing up, I lived with this world of real estate, and my parents had built up the small business, and I was very involved with that. Bu the time I went off to college, the one thing that I knew for certain was that I wanted nothing to do with this family business. I went off to school for computer science, mathematics, management, among other things, and went and did five different types of entrepreneurial jobs for a while, to explore what's out there, but my dad really wanted me to join the business. For me, I wrestled with my own ego. And the reason that one, I didn't want people to think that this business was somehow given to me, right? I wanted to get out there, and do my own thing, and prove to the world that I can accomplish something great. But seeing that, I realized deep down, what I really wanted to do was to make some kind of meaningful, positive impact in the world. And if that was my goal, and if I'm willing to put my ego aside, I realized that I can do that by taking the small business that my parents had started, and growing that to a scale, into a size that we can actually meaningfully impact something in the world. And for me, that eventually became trying to solve housing affordability.
So, was Norhart the family business? Was that where the seeds that your parents planted a long time ago, is that what is Norhart today?
Absolutely, yes.
Okay, so give us a brief history from the time that you had your arms folded and didn't want to, you know, have anything given to you, to kind of accepting that getting into the business, apparently. and now, you know, you guys are big. You are having a meaningful impact. I know you've got some visions of you know, not just building buildings, renting buildings, making money from that, but you've got some bigger picture. So, before we get to some of those things, like, take me from that kid, who again, in my mind has his arms crossing. I want to get into that too. Well, not only am I into it, but we're growing this thing. And we're doing something. Like tell us that story a little bit.
Yeah, so after college wrestling with my ego, as I mentioned before, kind of understanding that deeper vision is why I decided to jump in. Once I did jump in, my dad and I, we’re like two peas in a pod. In many ways, we're very similar. And we, over the couple of years actually doubled the size of the company. Really exciting. And about three or four years in, my dad had a stroke that was caused by a brain tumor that ended up killing him. In fact, overnight, I went from having my dad and this like- partner in the business, to just losing him. And, you know, I remember the night that it happened, and my dad came into the office to- where we got to call from the bank, saying, hey, Mike, I don't know what's going on here, but your employees, their checks are about to bounce. And there's like, we've never in our entire history ever bounced a check, let alone to one to an employee. Like, something's wrong here. We'll figure this out. Well, turned out my dad had deposited the money into the wrong account. And so, we call them up, brought him back to the office to fill out a check to move it to the right account, but he went on to sit and fill out that check and he was unable to do so. And he couldn't even sign his name. So, I helped him through the check. We raced home that night to my parents’ house just to be with my mom and dad and something seemed off. We didn't know what. The next morning, I got a frantic call from my mom, saying that something was seriously wrong with my dad, and he was refusing to go to the hospital. So, I raced over to my parents’ house and just seeing him, I walked into a pantry shut the door and just cried. I knew in that moment; it was never going to be the same. So, he ended up living six months later, but that day, he had a severe stroke, and he was essentially not human anymore. He was a vegetable. And after that, I came back. And so that was on Saturday, I came back the next Monday. And here I am you know, running the company. I didn't take the title of CEO for like four or five years, because I didn't feel like I had earned it. And it was a huge challenge. In fact, we were working on a new project, it was called Ember Wood, and the city at the time, didn't really believe that I had what it takes to do the project, and in many ways, they were right. In fact, I didn't know the importance of building the right relationships with people in the city staff and things of that nature., and they just shut me down twice, and the second time they shut me down they said,, Mike, you don't have what it takes. You need to hire somebody else to step in and manage this project for you. So, I raced to find someone in just a matter of three days. It was over Thanksgiving weekend, so that I didn't have to lay off our staff. We found someone which is the worst way to hire leaders, to do it in three days.
The opposite of hire fast, fire slow, right? Like you are hiring fast, like very fast.
Exactly. But it was good enough. They kind of kept the city at bay, and we did the work behind the scenes. And then I remember about a month before we were supposed to open, there is a water main 1500 feet long buried 15 feet in the ground and there was a pressure test. The net test failed, basically saying that there was a pinhole water leak somewhere in this massive pipe. I was out there in my nice close with the excavators from sunrise to sunset day after day after day because they wanted to race off that project, shoveling through the mud trying to find this in pin hole water leak. We eventually found it. I remember a few days before we were supposed to open, the city staff came out and said, Mike, there's no way you were opening this building. And we had families that were about to move in. Where was I supposed to send them? We worked through the night, multiple days into the final day, about a half a dozen inspectors for a half a day inspection looked at every nook and cranny of that building. At the end, the head building official pulled me aside and said, Mike, I know we were hard on you, but honestly, this is the best project that we've opened in the city.
There ya go.
That was sort of the first moment that I finally felt like maybe I had this; maybe we can move forward.
You earned your stripes on that project. How long ago was that, Mike?
That was maybe 2014.
Okay. Okay. And you've continued to grow Norhart significantly since then, it sounds like. How many employees all together these days?
Yeah, we're about 200 employees.
Okay. So very, very large. And you have taken your lumps from a leadership standpoint along the way, one, undoubtedly, and two, you've already alluded to some of those lumps. You know, our audience is mostly leaders, in some form or fashion they're leading others from a professional standpoint. There's gotta be some insight, some principles that, you know, you've kind of picked up along the way and maybe in a unique way, then, you know, you might hear off the shelf, you know, leadership techniques or tools. What types of leadership insights, Mike, have you picked up along the way that might be unique to you?
You know, the most important one that I've ever learned, and it totally changed the game for us. It went from us being a small company to in some years doubling in size every single year. And that is to hire the very best. When I say the best, I truly mean the best. We will fly people in from other states to come work during the week and fly them home on the weekend. When one of our staff members in 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, Steve Jobs walked off that stage with a brand-new iPhone and our employee walked on that same stage following Steve Jobs to present some more stuff. It is that kind of caliber, because those people, they change things. They make things happen that you did not know were possible. They unlock doors for you. Now what I was struggling with it, and I'm sure many leaders look at that and struggle with is, they say, Mike, that sounds expensive. And it is. It is if you are looking at it at a cost per person basis. But what I failed to understand at that time is that the best people outperform the average by two to five to even ten times as much. So instead of looking at a cost per person basis, if you look at it at a cost per unit produced, the best people aren't your most expensive, they are actually your biggest bargain. For those who feel they can't afford to hire the best, my simple responses is this: You can't afford not to.
One way to look at what you're saying, and this is just me being simpleton here, but, you know, you offer that you all are a $200 million organization. And you just told me, you had about 200 employees? I mean, my math right there says, well, I don't know. Each employee's worth what? Pretty simple math there, right? And the answer is a lot. And so yeah, I hear you. And, you know, I've heard a lot of leaders over the years, Mike, and we have clients who would nod their head to this, but say, you know, hire the best. But the detail that you just went into with no, like specifically who, and it sounds like you go to great lengths to make sure that you've got the best. I mean flying people to come in and work and flying them back, and as some companies do that, but most won't, because like you alluded to, it's just expensive, it sounds like you're willing to get the best of the best, which means a ton. Any downside to that, Mike?
Not that I have seen. It took me a long time to finally understand that point, we went through a lot of struggles, before I did that. But once you bring in that caliber of team, the work gets to be really fun. Like, our leadership team, the people I work with on a daily basis, like, it took me years to get to this point, but like, we are almost two sides of one coin. Like, we're so fluid, we work so incredibly well together., that what you don't realize is those tensions, the conflict, the issues that you're dealing with in your business right now can be solved by bringing the right people in. And once you've done that, like the magic that happens within those teams. You know, I have seen what world leading teams truly look like and once you have a glimpse, like a real glimpse, not just that fake yeah I want to hire the best language, but you've actually seen how that functions, you get this bug inside of you and you say, I can't stop until every single team in our organization is operating at that level with that caliber of people.
I can tell with the vigor and the passion that you've been answering that question that that's something that's in your bones. One of the things I've observed, and you see this in professional athletics, and I have seen it in business too, you know, hiring the best of the best sometimes is costly, like you say. There is a problem that I've seen, and you haven't alluded to yet, but I'd love to get your take on it. Sometimes the best of the best comes with, I don't know if for lack of better words, I will call it baggage, whether that's a high ego, or a higher expectation of others than then is, you know, really reality, you know, just some of those types of things. You ever run into that, and if you do what, what do you do about it?
Yeah, you brought up a good couple of points there. So, for ego, I would say it depends on how you define the best, right? For us, there's two parts to that. The first part is do they have the skill set? Like our engineer, for example, he's probably the top engineer in the country when it comes to our kind of engineering. They go back to the US with the regulators, and they'll actually correct errors that they find in the US government. Like, that's the level of caliber the team is operating at. But he would not be the best in our mind if he only met that requirement. The second requirement, and frankly, the harder one to pass in our organization is do you fit the values of our organization, right? And for one of those values, it is to be a genuine human. For the engineer, he's phenomenal. He's got that tooth and nail as well. But we have certainly met with a bunch of engineers and architects that did not line up with that. And then we had to let them go because they weren't a good-values fit. So that was ego. The next one he brought up was really interesting. A- players don't like spending time or interacting with B and C players, and that is a reality. But we use that to our advantage. And how what do I mean? When we do the hiring process, first off, we have our own recruiting hiring team and in house we found this really important to make sure we're delivering the right caliber candidate. They go through values and skills-based interview processes. Then they get evaluated by the managers and the people on site. But for most of our roles, when you get hired on, you're not really permanently hired on yet. There is what we call the trial period, which can last several weeks or a month. And you get paid, but at the end of that time period, your coworkers make the decision whether or not you actually get hired or not. This is where we use that to it advantage. A players know what other A players look like; they don't want to deal with lower-level players. They don't accept anyone that's not at the level that they are. And that has been an incredible way for us to keep the talent density high.
How long is that tribe before you buy period?
Usually two weeks, but it can be longer.
Oh really? Okay. Okay Do you mind if I go a little deeper?
Oh, yeah.
To me listening on the outside, that sounds like an incredibly short period of time. Are there certain paces that your new people are put through to so that everybody really sees how this person operates, how they deal with challenges, how they communicate? Like, what's happening during those two weeks?
Yeah, so for the first two weeks, there is a concerted effort to make sure that everyone on that team gets time to work with that individual. And so, they'll kind of rotate him around different parts of the team that they'd be working on. But I'd say on top of that, we do that evaluation process more than 50% the people that we thought were good, actually get cut after those two weeks. But I would say too, though, is we follow a Netflix's principle of the keeper test. So, we don't always get it right, even after two weeks. So, the keeper test, for those who ever heard is, if a particular employee were to quit, how hard would you fight to change their mind? And the answer is if you'd fight tooth and nail to keep them, great. They are the right person. Anything shy of that, they're not the right person. So, at orientation, and I do all of the orientations, we outline that this is part of our company. And I tell people right up front. Most companies, they know they want the best, most companies know they don't want the bad ones, but how we're different than most companies are that we don't want the average. Nothing wrong with average people. There are many great places to work, but we're trying to change the industry, and that requires people at the very top tier. And so, we regularly go through that analysis to make sure that we have the right people, and we will let good people go who are not the right fit.
So, once they're in, and I don't know, it's been a year, I don't know. I guess the question I want to ask is, okay, that is the keeper test, then what about ongoing review or analysis or hitting certain marks? You know, KPIs. Like, how are people then measured within the organization?
It depends on the position. The higher you go, the more KPIs you have that get reported on. So, for example, like the leadership level, there's about 20 to 25 KPIs that we look at every single week, and each one of those KPIs has a person that’s assigned to assuring that that KPI stays at the standard. Then that person and their team has that subset of maybe five or so KPIs they bring down to their level, and they might incorporate that a few more that don't get rolled up to the leadership. When you get all the way down to the construction, individual construction worker, the way that they know if they're achieving or not achieving the results, we have their scheduled broken down into which unit gets executed on which hour and what tasks that are doing. It's a lot like a manufacturing process. So, you either are green, or you're red, and there's yellow. So you're green, if you're down and out on time with that particular task. You are red, if it's even a minute late, or if you're 99% complete, that's not good enough. I hate 99%, because oftentimes the 99% means 50%.
That's right. Yep.
And then we'll have yellow if you're done early, because we still want to identify that to see if we can streamline our processes. So yeah, the individual construction worker also has their own individual KPI for their tasks that they're working on.
I have a mentor who runs just a great organization in North Carolina, and I was down to see him last year. It's a series of climbing gyms. And something he said to me the day when I was doing a ride along with him stuck with me, that's reminding me of what you're saying right now, which is, I mean, when you talk about 20 to 25 KPIs that are measured weekly, and then this whole green, red, 99% is red and you know, he said he is maniacal about his measurements. Whether it comes to expense or to KPIs, things like you're talking about, he's like, literally maniacal. Now, everybody loves working for this organization. You walk into the gyms and all the employees are having a blast, and they have a smile on their face. And I'm like, typically, you think of like the maniacal measurement, and I think of the word like micromanaging, and even what you just said, you know, that amount of KPIs on that cadence of measurement, you could think of this micromanaging, which is kind of typically not a great connotation, but the way that you're explaining it, and the way that my friend Joel, who's been a guest on the show as well explains it is no, it's the A players that actually want that. They want that and they thrive in that environment, and they're helping each other around them, you know, do the same thing. Be green. And let's reach those KPIs. And if not, what do we need to do to change it? And so, that starts to be a culture thing in my mind. Mike, what could you tell us about that? Like, I don't know if I'm touching on something or not, but like, the culture, at Norhart, how would you describe that?
One thing I’ll mention quick on KPIs first, another important reason to drive good KPIs and make sure people are executing is if someone fails at executing something with an organization, that will often take down a whole chunk of other people, and so people get frustrated when they can't do their work effectively, especially if it's something else that is outside their control.
Yeah.
And so, they actually feel better when you're holding everyone accountable, so that everyone can get their work done effectively. As far as culture, you can't bring on the best, unless you're worthy of having the best. During orientation, I actually take a moment and just pause and say, if you can make it here, I mean, you can literally make it anywhere. You know, our teams get often lots of recruiters are reaching out to our team members on a regular basis. And I tell them, if a recruiter calls you, take the phone call, right? I want what's best for you. And I want to have earned the right for you to work here. And so, if there's some something better out there, better pay, better benefits, better working conditions, better culture, like give me that feedback so that I can improve and grow as a leader here, and that our business can do better to support you, the employee. So that's really fundamentally important to us to execute on that. We've got surveys that go out every six months, and every six months, we get a list of feedback at things we're screwing up on. And it's actually super valuable, because then we can work to improve them, come back six months later and say, okay, how are we doing now in those things. Another part of it is you need to pay top of market pay, top of market benefits. And when we look at our market, we don't look just at just at construction companies, we look at who's doing it best in the world. And so, we look at Google and Facebook and Netflix. And for benefits, they we have copied virtually every benefit that Google offers and now we offer to our own employees. This includes things like unlimited paid time off. And for the world of hourly construction workers on the front lines, this is unheard of.
Sure. Right, I bet.
But I would say more importantly than all of that, all cheer that people experience on site is a direct link, the kinds of people that you hire. And so, for us, again, we have five core values. One value that differentiates us completely in construction is being a genuine human. When you come onto our construction sites, even if you don't know the people, they will greet you. Hey, how are you doing? Like welcome, thanks for being here. And then if you're brand new, working on something, and you don't know how to do it, you can ask people and they're eager and willing to help you out. I've seen other construction sites where it is polar opposite because they want to keep the apprentices down and keep their wages down. They don't want to share that information. Here, our goal is to see if we can get an apprentice to become a journeyman years before they normally would. It's a different kind of perspective that we're like, here to help and support each other, to try to change the way construction is done.
How would you define your value of being a genuine human?
Yeah. Respect, humble, open, honest and vulnerable. So, respect is a big one in construction, because it is pretty typically disrespectful. It’s crazy how much it is that way. But one of my favorites to touch on is vulnerable. And I will give you an example of this in the way we kind of really bring this out in people. Every year we do an offsite meeting with each one of the teams, and during that offsite meeting we talked about purpose, mission, values. Again, look at the future of the company where we're heading, and we get feedback from the team. And the exercise that everyone talks about is the 360 degree feedback. And the way we do this is we go around the room, and each person looks at each other, one at a time, eye to eye, person to person and they share with you what you're doing really well.
That feels good.
Right? It takes a couple hours, then we come back, we do the same exercise, and we share with people what they're not doing well. And most people go through a few different stages. The first is this fear, and ignorance, right? You don't know what you don't know. You can only see about 70% of your body directly without a mirror. The same is true with their personalities. You’re afraid of what you're about to find out. And then there's this moment of pain and vulnerability. And that is when people are all telling you the same feedback, and you're looking at yourself and you're like, maybe I am like that. Maybe this is something that I struggle with. And then seeing people being vulnerable in that moment, it's incredible. Here's the magic. That last step is this, it's accepting. Because what you realize in those moments of being vulnerable, is that everyone in that room still accepts you for who you are, despite the challenges that you have, and that's where these teams go from just being a collection of people doing a job to feeling much more like a brother. And that’s so powerful.
That's where the money is right there. That is so good. Mike, I feel like I could ask you the next few hours about some of the nitty gritty detail of how you do what you do at Norhart, but I'm going to stop myself and gonna hold myself back because I want to get to, you all seem to have a bigger picture in mind here. I mean, any Google of you shows up, you know, this idea of solving the US affordability crisis when it comes to real estate, and I just want to get to that piece of it. That seems like it's very important to you. And so, I'd love to one. First, have you define that, but then explain what Norhart is doing to make that a reality?
Yeah, for us, we want to make housing actually affordable. If you look at the past decades, housing costs have risen faster than things like inflation and it’s just unsustainable for people.
Yeah.
And in the world of construction, given the way we do things, we can talk more about that if you like, we've been able to drive down the cost of construction, by about 20 to 30%.
That's significant.
It is. And our dream is to eventually get to 50%. But imagine what that means. That means someday your rent or mortgage payment could be half. See, if you look at other industries like manufacturing, over the past 60 years, they've improved labor productivity by 760%. With the world of construction has done virtually nothing, improving just by 10% over that same time period. So, the basic idea is can we take the lessons learned from these other industries and apply it into the world of construction? And what we're finding is the answer that is yes. For example, Toyota is well known for having reduced manufacturing costs, and improving the design of their vehicles, and they did this through a philosophy that they call Lean. So okay, great. Can we just reach out to Toyota and build a partnership directly with them? Turns out the answer is yes. We connected with Toyota, and they wanted to share Lean principles beyond more than just manufacturing, they wanted to provide other areas and they thought construction was a good way to do that. So, we started partnering with them. They fire their executives on a regular basis. It's amazing what you can learn from them, and the insights you can take from manufacturing, and apply it into the world of construction.
Okay, so the main way that you're going to solve what you're calling a crisis, and I would agree with you. My background is mortgage and real estate too, and yeah, I've seen firsthand exactly what you're talking about and would agree that it is a crisis. Your manner of solving that is driving down the construction costs. Maybe there's other ways, but that's the that seems like that's at the core of how you want to solve this challenge.
Yeah, absolutely. But the often the common question I get at this point is they say, well, Mike, that sounds good, but does that mean you're just patting your own pockets getting up a profit margin and you are not actually solving anyone's actual rental rates or housing prices? Great question. I'm glad you asked it. And the answer is this. That our rental rates are at market rates. They're not at lower than anyone else at the moment. So why is that? Because if I went to lower rental rates today, I would solve housing affordability for a few 1000 people. That's great. That's nothing to sneeze at. But it doesn't solve it the US as a whole. So how do you solve it for the US as a whole? What we're doing is we're taking those profits, and we're putting it into the system that builds that housing. We've got manufacturing plants, manufacturing, concrete sourcing and supply chain engineer architecture, all of this infrastructure to build a machine that can build housing at lower costs. Elon Musk talks about how it's hard to produce a car, but it is 10 to 100 to 1000 times harder to build the system that builds that car. Now, as we build out that system, our dream is to scale up production to reach something like 60,000 units per year. At that sort of pace, we're producing so many units for a given market, given supply and demand factors, the abundance of supply starts driving down the price of housing in that market. And here's the magic. It's not just for our own residents, it's for everyone in that market that we're supplying housing to. And that's fundamentally how you can solve housing affordability. I think a lot of the other techniques are taking money out of the government and putting it into housing. You can't really solve it on a national wide basis, because you can't take enough money out of the economy to solve housing. So, this is the way that we think it can be solved.
Thank you for that. I probably have 28 questions just on that. But again, I'm going to hold myself back. Mike, is there is there anything under the umbrella of what we've been talking about so far that I haven't asked you that, that you'd like our listeners to know about?
You know, one thing that I have learned at a deeper level, is how whenever we start something new, we're terrible at it. And that's okay. Right? As a kid, we, we can't walk, we can't talk, we can't ride a bike. And growing up, we're okay with that. We're learning, we're exploring, we're trying new things. Something in us happens as we get to become an adult. We start to think anything that we do, should just be good out of the gate, and if I make a mistake, that is a reflection of me, and now I'm somehow a failure. What I found is in the road of trying to really change something is a road complete a failure, and to be okay with that will really help enable you and your success.
So those are profound words, and I can nod my head yes to that, and I've experienced a lot of that and my own life and the businesses that I've been involved with, but it is so much easier said than done.
Oh, yeah.
And so with you and I agreeing on that, is there, and I'm probably putting you on the spot here with just the time that we have left and everything, but is there something that you could point to whether it's a story or an adage or something that is in your brain that allows us to go from nodding yes to that, but then man, when I've got my next really big challenge, you know, the one that no one else understands, how do I live out what you just said?
Yeah, that's a great question. There are a few parts to it. And actually, if you look at an elite athletes, when you look at really the difference between a gold medalist and a silver medalist, a lot of times, they have very similar preparation, a lot of hard work and drive to accomplish at that level. But really, and I've heard elite athletes talk about this, it's about pain management in some ways. And so, it's about pushing yourself just a little bit further, a little bit faster, a little bit harder, despite every bone in your body screaming to stop. Business is similar to that. You're gonna hit points throughout business, that everything in your world is screaming that you are failing at what you are doing. And so, there's a muscle or capability that you need to build up to deal with that pain. It doesn't just magically go away. There are a few things that I recommend to people. One is, who are your top five friends or people you regularly interact with? If it's people that have done things the old way or just a different perspective on life, they will look at you and say yeah, you're failing. Like you know, the make it difficult for you and hold you back. Instead, you need people in your life that are living a similar experience that are uplifting and helping encourage one another to help get through that stage. Just the friends you have can help alleviate that stress. Another big one is you just have to get in and live it. It's like a muscle with anything, just lifting weights. the more you exercise, and live the experience of stress, that pain, the more you gain the capability to deal with that. I look at the challenges we're faced with today, and they're in a totally different scale than they were 10 years ago. The 10 year ago problems wouldn't even faze me today. And the last thing I would say is you're not going to have the fortitude to get through it unless what you're doing is something you truly love and you truly believe in. You've got to have that inner energy to make it through. If you're just doing your job, because you just want to make a bunch of money, when things get tough, it's going to be too easy to pull out.
Right on. Such a good place to stop. Thank you for that. I was thinking that I was asking you too general have a question for you to pinpoint anything but yet you gave some really specific advice. So those of you that are listening right now, I know I'm taking notes on what Mike just said there, but boy, oh boy, I hope that helps you tangibly as you work through your next challenge and struggles because gosh, kind of like you alluded to like they're going to come, especially if you're working towards something great. Like the challenges are going to be daily, and so thank you for that. I have a feeling people are going to want to reach out to you, Mike. What's the best way for that to happen?
The best way is simply to visit our website. That's Norhart.com. On there, you can contact us, you can visit my LinkedIn profile or my different profiles. One kind of fun side thing is we have our own podcast called Zero Unicorn. One of my favorite guests to give you some sense was Michael Usland, who was the originator and the executive producer of Batman. And when we talk about failure, it took him 10 years of people slamming the door in his face saying that nobody wants a dark and serious superhero movie. And you can see today, being the founder of all of that, he proved them wrong. But it took him 10 years of rejection and failure before he got it through.
Well, I want to go to listen to that episode right now, man. Very well done. Mike, you nailed it. So, so good. Can't wait for this episode to drop. Grateful for your time, my friend. It's been nice getting to know you. And yeah, just thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you so much as well.
Until next time. So many insights from Mike, CEO of Norhart. Some of the things that I wrote down, gosh, that guy went to principles right away. Values right away. Making a meaningful, positive impact on the world. That is something that you could just tell is at the core of what he does, and he's decided to do it through construction. And then he gave all kinds of things that he's doing very tangibly to make that vision and core of who he is happen. The keeper test, he talked about the Netflix keeper test. How he hires people, big time try before you buy. He's got that two weeks where people come on board, but they're not fully hired, and then they get to work with the people that they'll be working with on a daily basis, and those are the people that give the high sign of whether that person should actually be hired on or not. Very, very cool. They obviously do not want to be average, the 20 to 25 KPIs that are measured weekly, all the way down to the construction worker level on the job site, just quite amazing. Their value of being a genuine human. And then he was able to very tangibly point out, you know, the definition and what that means and what that looks like. Looking at the friends around you and how they're encouraging you. I don't know, there's just so many insights that I had, I could go on and on. Really excited about this episode. I can't wait for people to be listening to it. So anyways, those were my insights, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights were, but really dear listeners, it matters what insights you had.
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