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In this episode, you’ll hear EAG chief marketing officer Jeff Randolph talk about the elusive unicorn: that ONE mythical marketing hero your company dreams of hiring to do everything from marketing strategy to copywriting to website design and media buying. Guess what? That unicorn isn’t out there, but EAG is, and with EAG, your company gets the skills it needs from every marketing discipline, provided by our team of experts. You don’t need that one person that doesn’t exist. You need EAG.
Next, you’ll hear Jeff chat with Bob and Josh Kobush of Commercial Concrete Solutions. Bob is president and his son Josh is secretary/treasurer of this family-owned business whose repair method saves customers thousands of dollars and days of delay vs. the cost of concrete removal and replacement. Coincidentally, a Commercial Concrete Solutions crew was busy working just outside EAG during our recording session, but our expert audio producer Theo Terry was adept at mitigating the noise of concrete repair.
Listen and learn what Commercial Concrete Solutions can do at airport runways, elephant habitats and the sidewalks at EAG. You won’t hear the phrase “cementitious material” in every podcast, but you’ll hear it here!
Transcript:
Jeff Randolph:
Keep moving forward. Welcome to the Small Business Miracles podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This Small Business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising & Marketing. We’re going to talk about marketing. We’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs. We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward, plus a featured interview you’re not going to want to miss. Today we are talking with our friends at Commercial Concrete Solutions. Let’s get to it.
A quick word about hiring marketing unicorns. A marketing unicorn is a truly magical beast, and one that companies have tried to find and capture throughout history. It’s that special superhuman marketer who is equal parts project manager, strategist, copywriter, and designer. A person who is equally comfortable in the traditional marketing world, and is driven by curiosity to stay up-to-date on the latest updates and changes and best practices in digital marketing.
As you can imagine, that unicorn can be tough to capture and to force to board your company’s arc. If you have a job to fill and it requires you to be a copywriter and a designer, you have two jobs to fill. Not one job, you have two. That’s why outsourcing makes sense when you’re trying to replace or hire that marketing unicorn. When a company works with an outsourced marketing agency, they have access to all of these roles in exactly the amount of time needed to do the job. No more, no less.
The cost efficiencies make themselves clear, with each role staffed by a specialist to drive better results than when they’re trying to be staffed by someone who is attempting to do more than one role when they’re wearing several different job hats. The concept of outsourced marketing makes a lot of sense in today’s business environment. As businesses grow and scale, keeping pace with the fast-paced and ongoing algorithmic changes of digital marketing is a full-time job on its own.
What are the latest laws and regulations? Have the best practices changed over time? How did the algorithm changed last night that wasn’t publicized by Google? How did that impact your search visibility? Specialists in these areas pay attention to each of those things because they have to. Now, add to that the challenges of hiring and retaining top talent in the current HR market, and it can steal a whole lot of time and focus away from hiring managers and current staff. So, yeah, it’s an awkward position to be in. Outsourced marketing makes a whole lot of sense.
Look, we love a unicorn. I may even identify as one in some cases. But the outsourced marketing model is eminently more flexible and gives the organization the exact number of hours needed with no employment benefits, training time or idle time. Adding an outsourced marketing team to an already established department to fill in specialty gaps, like search marketing or art direction, or search engine optimization and social media, while letting your in-house staff direct projects, is an additional way to piece together the ideal marketing department that will scale as the business does. If you have a unicorn, hang on to them, and if you don’t, think about outsourcing.
Jeff Randolph:
All right, welcome back to the podcast. We are here with Commercial Concrete Solutions. That is Bob and Josh Kobush. Hey, welcome to the podcast, guys.
Bob Kobush:
Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.
Josh Kobush:
Yeah, thanks for having us in.
Jeff Randolph:
We’re happy to be here. It’s Bob and Josh Kobush with Commercial Concrete Solutions. For the listeners, explain the relationship there. Because there is a relationship there, right?
Bob Kobush:
Yes, Josh is my son.
Jeff Randolph:
That makes sense. So, if you’re listening on the radio dial, that’s Bob on the right side of your radio dial, Josh on the left side. Do you work with other family as well? Is that…
Bob Kobush:
Yes, our daughter is the office manager.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, it’s a whole family operation here.
Bob Kobush:
Yep. Our son-in-Law is one of the technicians, and I guess our niece’s husband is one of our sales persons. So, it’s kind of a family deal.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, thanks for not employing any of the rest of Kansas City. Just keep it all right there. And people listening, this is an instance where you may hear some concrete jackhammering going on right outside of our recording studio, and we’re just going to let it happen and have it as some background flavor for this one. So, if you hear things, it is relevant sound coming out of that, so, appropriate to your podcast. First just give me the overview. What does Commercial Concrete Solutions do?
Josh Kobush:
We’re a repair company, concrete repair company. Instead of just tearing out and replacing concrete, and that’s been the normal for years, we can actually have scenarios where we can fix that concrete, repair it, and get the customers back to service in a quicker amount of time so that they can keep going and keep their business active.
Jeff Randolph:
Man. So, it’s “repair, don’t replace”. That’s the motto that we should all be thinking about for lots of things. When you say “fast”, and it’s fast repair, what does fast really mean in this situation? Because you’re repairing everything from walk-in coolers, to sidewalks, like happening right here. Everything you guys do.
Josh Kobush:
Correct, and in some locations that can be minutes. It just depends. Once the repair is completed, they can get back to service as soon as we’re cleaning up and leaving. It could be 10 to 15 minutes after the repair is finished. Whereas with standard concrete, you’re at least seven days for it to cure before you can get back on, not including the downtime of the tear-out.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, let me ask the next part, because cost-effective is the other part of that. From a cost-effective standpoint, what do we mean by being more cost-effective?
Josh Kobush:
Oh, it can be half. It can be half or even more in some cases, depending on the building and the structure and what the tear-out would include. But across the board, we’re usually half of what a tear-out would be.
Jeff Randolph:
Gotcha, okay. So, less than half the cost potentially of the cost to replace that stuff. Use cases like cold weather, cold freezers, anything like that that impacts it? How does…
Josh Kobush:
Well, weather really impacts concrete, and that’s one of the areas that we really shine in. The products that we have, we can work in active freezers. The old repairs were epoxies, and they would have to actually bring the freezer up to working temperatures to where it’s not frozen anymore, which causes them a lot of problems with their product that’s in the freezers and their working conditions. With the materials we have, we can go into their freezer while it’s still frozen, their products are still in there, perform the repairs, and get them back to service in the same day.
Jeff Randolph:
Man. Is there a reason why a business owner would want to replace then? It seems like for cost and for fast, this is everything you’d ever hope for. I was actually looking on the website, 15 minutes and back to work in a lot of cases. A cargo plane rolls over a repair you did at the airport in four hours. That is a fully-loaded cargo plane rolling over this stuff. That’s impressive, fellas.
Bob Kobush:
It was only 300,000 pounds, so it wasn’t a big…
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, well, not a heavy lift there.
Bob Kobush:
This was at a facility on the traffic wire, the tarmac that they have to get planes in at all times. It was a freight company, and so they said, “Well, you can come in here and do this repair.” Obviously if we did a tear-out, it would be a long process. So, you can have, what did we have it for? Six hours?
Josh Kobush:
Yeah, it was six hours. We waited on the plane to taxi out about 9:30 in the morning, we went out and got started, and then I believe the plane came back in around 3:00.
Jeff Randolph:
Wow, man, and just ready to go. That’s amazing. That is a great technology. Exactly the right thing you’d want if business is important to you. If using whatever it is you’re repairing is critical to your business, this seems like a no-brainer for the most part. Tell us what’s happening on the sidewalk outside that we can hear.
Josh Kobush:
Yeah. So, right out here in front of you guys, we had actually some sidewalk that we had done some repairs on with some cementitious material, and then there’s some spots that are larger. If the area gets large enough, we revert back to just the traditional tear-out and replace, and that’s actually what’s going on out in front of your office today.
One of the biggest things that we do for our customers and for businesses is instead of just directing them into the standard tear-out and replace scenario that’s always been there, we try to offer them solutions for their problem. It may be a tear-out, but it may not. It may be a less intrusive repair that we can get them back to service a lot less expensive and a lot faster. But at the end of the day, we’re going to help them assess their property, their infrastructure, and try to give them the best solution to get them back to service or keep them in service.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh. So, just kind of listening to the business owner and saying, “Here’s what’s important to me. I need no downtime,” or, “I need minimal downtime,” or, “I need this to last for a lifetime,” or whatever the case is, and just figuring out what is the right solution for you and make that happen.
Josh Kobush:
Everybody’s business is so unique, and learning what’s unique to them, what helps them, what keeps them going is really what gives us an advantage to get them repaired and back going.
Jeff Randolph:
Outstanding. I also noticed on the website that you’ve got some great projects that you’ve done. The Bravo runway at KCI, the Kansas City International Airport, to the elephant enclosure at the zoo. Was the elephant enclosure actually more… Were they heavier than the 300,000 pound cargo plane? I assume the weight of an elephant is probably not.
Bob Kobush:
Slightly, but they give them toys to play with, the elephants.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, it’s more rigorous.
Bob Kobush:
But the toy that they play with is a tree trunk. So, they would take this tree trunk and they would bang it against the concrete wall. Well, eventually it would start crumbling, and as it starts crumbling, they think, “All right, this is fun. Let’s see how much more we can get it to crumble.”
So, at some point in time they had to ask us, and it was a big, tall, 12, 16-foot tall wall. If you’d had to come them in and replace that, my gosh, it would’ve taken forever. So, we were able to do repairs on a portion of the wall, and get the elephants back to swinging their trunks, and it’s still going strong today.
Jeff Randolph:
Man. When we find out that that was just an elaborate, very intelligent escape attempt, that’s going to be where we really understand more about elephants. Well, those are two projects that were on the website. Do you have others that are favorites of, “Yeah, this was a neat thing.”
Bob Kobush:
Ninja Turtle.
Josh Kobush:
Yeah. We call it the Ninja Turtle project. We did one for the city in the West Bottoms. We were 30 feet below grade repairing some sewer tunnels, and it was a large project. It was a fun project.
We’ve done several. I enjoy just really getting to help our customers. The ones I enjoy are the ones that are the most challenging. They’ve been turned down, or had other contractors that wouldn’t bid it or look at it, and we come in and turn them into successful projects. Those are probably my favorite.
Jeff Randolph:
The, “You want us to go where? Okay. Well, yeah, we’ll put our Ninja Turtle hats on and we we’ll get out there.” Man, neat.
Bob Kobush:
“And you’ve got six hours to tear this out and put it back, so we can have our 300,000 pound plane come back and…”
Jeff Randolph:
That is crazy.
Bob Kobush:
No problem.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Did you have a different answer to the question of what your favorite was? Or…
Bob Kobush:
Oh, I don’t know if I had an actual favorite. Like he said, they’re all fun because they’re all different. They’re all different challenges. And you talked earlier about the cost of the repair versus replacements. Sometimes half or less. But the nice thing about that, they’ll say, “Well, what’s the guarantee? Why would I ever replace concrete?”
Sometimes concrete gets to the end of its useful life and it has to be replaced. But up until that point we can usually facilitate a repair, and it would last as long as the concrete around it. We give the same guarantee whether we repair it or we tear it out and replace it. So, as far as peace of mind, you’ve got that, too, and at half the cost.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, you guys are definitely the people to call, it sounds like. Every time someone needs something done with concrete, you guys are the ones to call. I think that sets us up to get right into the lightning round. Gentlemen, are you ready for the lightning round?
Josh Kobush:
Yeah, we’re going to try.
Jeff Randolph:
Excellent. All right. The lightning round is shorter sound-bite kind of answers. We’ll dive in if we need to, but we’re just going top of your head, whatever ends up being there when we throw this question out.
I’m going to start it this way. We know that we should be repairing concrete and not replacing it. I’m going to list off a few things that can also be either repaired or replaced, and I’d like to tell me if in those instances it should be repaired or just replaced. Jewelry and watches? Should you repair those or just replace them?
Bob Kobush:
Repair.
Josh Kobush:
Repair. They usually have sentimental value.
Jeff Randolph:
Martha Stewart agrees with you. That’s exactly what her recommendation was. This was also a Martha Stewart one. Window screens? Repair or replace?
Bob Kobush:
Repair.
Josh Kobush:
Repair.
Jeff Randolph:
Repair. Easy choices. Now, Ziploc bags?
Bob Kobush:
Replace.
Josh Kobush:
Replace.
Jeff Randolph:
Okay, all right. I can see it. Now we’re there. The mattress on your bed?
Bob Kobush:
Replace.
Josh Kobush:
Replace.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s a replace every time. That’s pretty gross. Martha Stewart had nothing to do with that, but I feel like she would agree with that. A car with 250,000 miles?
Josh Kobush:
That’s a tough one.
Bob Kobush:
That’s a tough one.
Josh Kobush:
It depends on the car.
Jeff Randolph:
It depends on the car. What would you go, “Yeah, I’m going to repair that”?
Bob Kobush:
That’s where we come in. We come in and evaluate the situation to decide where it’s time to repair or replace it.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s right. So, if you show up and it’s a sports car with no more useful life on it, we go, “No, no. Get rid of that thing.” And if it’s a classic, we definitely repair.
All right. You’ve had a family-owned business for generations now. If you’re talking to other entrepreneurs out there, what’s the best advice you can give about working with family? Because you’ve got no end of family working with you. What’s the best advice you can give if somebody else is in that situation where they’re working with family?
Bob Kobush:
I’d say do different jobs within the company. So, don’t try to do the same job with a family member, because I think that would cause problems. With Josh and I, Josh is the field guy, and he knows concrete inside and out, and everything else. I’m kind of the check signer and things like that. But because we have different skill sets, we can do different things, and it kind of keeps us…
Josh Kobush:
We’ve been fortunate. I know some people probably struggle in that aspect of working together as family, and I’ve heard that before. “Man, I don’t know how you guys do it.” But honestly it’s been pretty natural for us since we’ve started. I feel pretty blessed and pretty fortunate in that aspect, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s great.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Because I can look around even the office, like our neighborhood, and know that there are family-run businesses here that, they just don’t get along anymore. So, I like the advice. I think do different jobs so you don’t have somebody else doing exactly your job looking over your shoulder going, “You’re not doing it the right way.” Yeah, good advice. Appreciated. What’s the best business advice you’ve been given?
Bob Kobush:
Probably to always treat every customer like it was your own job. Treat every job like it was your own, and that’s kind of what we do. We go in and look at a project, and we give them advice based on what we would do if it was our money being spent.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s a good way to go. I think we do the same thing in marketing at EAG. We are doing the same. We’re saying, “Hey, look, I’m going to put my marketing director hat on for your company, and if I’m the marketing director, if I’m the chief marketing officer for your company, here’s what I’m going to recommend. Because I’m treating it like it’s my own now.” And that’s a good way to go. Different advice, Josh, on best business advice you’ve gotten?
Josh Kobush:
Mine follows in line with that. Dad’s preached that since we started the company, and we always try to be a good steward of our customer’s money and help them get along. It’s not about having one sale, it’s about building a partnership with your customers for a long time, and that’s what helps you to be successful.
Jeff Randolph:
Excellent. Excellent stuff. Let’s wrap it up. Where can people find you?
Bob Kobush:
Well, you can find us on the web at ccsguaranteed.com, you can call us at (816) 777-7192, or just stop by our office in Platte City.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, that is great. Bob and Josh Kobush from Commercial Concrete Solutions. Thanks for being on the podcast today.
Bob Kobush:
Thank you, Jeff.
Josh Kobush:
Thank you, Jeff. It’s been fun.
Jeff Randolph:
And that is our show. Thanks for listening to the Small Business Miracles podcast, and thanks also to Theo Terry, our engineer who is making sure that the construction noise outside from that great concrete repair job isn’t too crazy for us today. So, remember to subscribe. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Drop us a line on the website at eagadv.com if you have some thoughts. Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another small business miracle.