This is Under Pressure, a podcast where we dive into the untold stories of entrepreneurs and business owners who have conquered adversity to achieve greatness. And now, here's your host, Nick Staton.

Welcome to another episode of the Under Pressure Show. Today's guest is Mike Arnone. Thank you for coming on today. If you don't mind explaining to the guests a little bit about your background and stuff like that.

Nic Staton

Yeah, sure. So business wise, I pretty much started my business down in Broward, Florida. Probably about when I was 18 years old, I started my first painting business. I had no clue what to do. I had no clue how to paint, decorate, or anything else. But I had a guy that was mentoring me. So we started this painting business together. And so, you know, learn a lot of lessons along the way and, you know, try to be the jack of all trades and everything else and, you know, doing every single thing that we could possibly do in the painting industry. And so we did that for about 11 years. And after a while, with employees and everything else, and, you know, painters are are tough because there are a lot of them are always drunk, you know, and so it's really hard to get good quality painters. So I just got really sick and tired of it. And so I just started kind of praying and asking God, what do you want me to do? And I was pressure cleaning a roof one day. And all of a sudden, he's like, do this. I'm like, alright, cool. But the neat thing about it was, is that was back in 96, 97. The neat thing about it was, I knew just with the typical 5.5 gallon of pressure washer, I'm like, I'm not gonna make any money. And so that's when I kinda got into this whole Siamese-ing machines together. And so it kinda, like I was telling you earlier, each business led into each other to get us to where we're at today. We started Siamese-ing Machines, but the funniest thing about it was, I called crazy to some people, but not to me and you, we get it, is I woke up in a dream about Siamese-ing Machines together. And, uh, and I was like, what? I started praying about it. God is, how am I going to do this? You know? So I called all my vendors and said, Hey dude, how do I do this? And they're like, oh, it can't be done.

Mike Arnone

No way. There's no way. I was like, well, I didn't think of this, you know? And so I literally came back and went back to God and said, God, all the experts said, you know, you can't do it. They know what they're talking about. And so they, I was like, man, it was probably one of the most times that I ever heard like inside my voice, you know, heart, like that audible, you know, inside, you know, as much as possible.

And it was like, you want to believe them or you want to believe me? I was like, heck, all right, let me find out how to do it. And that's how I, when I told the guy afterwards, I said, if I was to do this, how do I do it? And he showed me how to do it, you know? And, but he's like, it ain't gonna work. So we started Siamese in two 5.5s at the time, eight gallons weren't around, 10 gallons weren't around. So, or if they were, they were really expensive, you know? So we started my pressure fitting business for a while, and we were doing that. And then we got to the point where we actually started using three machines together, three 5.5s. And so we were doing that till probably about 2008, 10, or whatever, when the 8s came out. And then we jumped to two 8s and such. But, you know, so I had my pressure fitting business for a while. We did really well. I ended up, you know, starting a paper sealing company about three, four years ago. And part of that came out of I, you know, bought another business, thinking I can, you know, go ahead and, you know, do another painting business and such. And within six months, I was like, this sucks, you know. And I was like, I ain't doing this again. Not backtracking. Oh, yeah. I was like, what the heck am I thinking, you know? And same issues and everything. So I was like, forget it. Six months later, I just literally just washed my hands from it and said, screw it. And so but that's how I started the paper sealing company, because I knew the paper sealing business was a better business. So we started that and did real successful about probably about a year, about eight months into it. The guy who was running my pressure painting business goes ahead and says, hey, you mind selling me your pressure painting business? I'm like, sure. Gave him my number and sold that to him. Uh, then, uh, we ended up, you know, we're really cranky with the paper ceiling business, but part of the whole reason why I wanted to, uh, sell the pressuring businesses so I could ultimately start high-level solutions, you know, that was my ultimate goal, you know, and, uh, cause I really just enjoy the equipment side of it. And obviously you see, you know, you know, firsthand, you know, what we do, you know, so. We ended up doing, um, uh, had the paper ceiling business for about three years. And then we ended up selling that just literally this past January to the guy who actually was running at Garfield. And so, uh, so now we're just full time, you know, doing high, low solutions and, you know, all that stuff. And, you know, I love it. I enjoy it a whole lot. Right.

That's cool. Um, so how exactly did you like start these business or start your business or whatever?

Um, I pretty much just, uh, you know, a lot of people, it's so hard for them to start businesses. And for me, I'm like, I get an idea and I'm like, heck with it, let's do it. And so, you know, I just go get, get busy right away. And usually most of the time, once I get a business in my mind, you know, that I want to do, and I have a vision with it. Um, I think that's the biggest thing is having a vision for it, you know, and, uh, and understanding where I'm going to go. Once I do that, man, I just start cranking and, you know, like the paper perfection company that we had. We did more in the first year than most people are doing after 3 or 4 years. And it's just because I knew how to market the thing. We didn't do any social media stuff. All we did was high-end magazines and everything. And a lot of guys spend a lot of money on different types of marketing. Social media is great. Don't get me wrong. But we found if my... I knew my audience.

or who I wanted to go to.

And I think a lot of guys never figure that out. And they just kind of like do a shotgun approach and just do everything. And one of the biggest keys of success for us has always been with my pressure creating businesses, finding a niche. Okay, I'm finding who my audience is, and saying, I'm going to mark how do I market to those people? And then I also said no to a lot of things. Right? I didn't, I wanted to be focused on what we did best. So like, and my pressure training business, for example, We were mainly a roof cleaning company and large groundwork stuff. That was it. That's how the beast came about. All of my equipment came about from my own businesses, you know? And so we were a niche. My paper sealing company, we saw the biggest need was people had failed sealer everywhere. every single job we went to, handyman specials, pressure trading companies that don't know how to seal. So all we did was we focused on stripping, mainly being a restoration company and stripping off the old sealer stuff, okay? And so, but that's how we market it. And we would have, we put our pictures in there of what failed sealer looked like, we showed our process in the high-end magazines, and we would get customers call us up and go, I have failed sealer."

And I'm like, how did you know? They're like, it's the picture.

And that's how we did. And so the business grew really, really fast because we marketed. And the amazing thing is, I was talking to someone yesterday about it, we were never even on Google.

Never had a Google business page? None of that?

On my press screening company, we did. But Google, for my paper, they wouldn't let it because we had other businesses already registered on the same address. And they were like really giving us a hard time. So we actually never had my business. you know, my Google business, or you search on paper perfection, you could never even find us. And so we grew really just from you know, that, you know, but the other thing with that is, is we didn't do any marketing to my repeat customers from pressure cleaning company, right for the first 2 years, because I wanted to see if we can grow this without. And then once we did, then it blew up even more, you know, so but

That's cool. So how did you, how did you, how did you start it? Or why did you start it? I mean, you know, Nick,

you have a heart desire to be better, you know what I'm saying? And do better for yourself. All my family, my dad, my uncles, all of them own their own businesses and such. And so I just saw that from the very get go, you know, when I was young, that's what I wanted to do. You know, I went to college a little bit for business. And I literally dropped out of it and such. But I always just had that within me that I just wanted to do my own thing. I always told people even, as I told you before, I was in the ministry for about 10 years. And I left in 2013 and then restarted the business. And I had people telling me, oh, go get a job, go get a job, just to provide. And I was nearly bankrupt. And they're like, you can't start a business. You're almost bankrupt as it is. How are you going to start a business? And I just told them, I said, I can't afford not to start my own business. And it was like, you just have this drive within you. And not everybody, as much as I do, not everybody's an entrepreneur. A lot of people are just, all they're doing is just having a job, a better job. But being an entrepreneur is something that you build it. You learn how to build your business and actually grow it from the inside out. And, you know, and ultimately, like now, especially I'm seeing, it's like, hey, you know, I could sell these businesses if I, if I do so, you know, if I do it well, because people can't start, they don't know how to start their own businesses and such, but they'll take over someone, someone's business, you know.

Yep. Cause there's a lot of people that just don't know how to actually get past that, that job thing or whatever. And I was one of those people myself that had that same mentality for the longest time, all the way up until probably a year ago. And then finally loosening up and then here in the last, like six months, really loosening up. Yeah.

You're getting, it takes time, man. You know, you know what it does. It's, um, it's, uh, when you get to a point where you realize you just can't do it all, you know, and you can make a good living by yourself, you know, doing that, but you know, like the guy Garfield that just, I think you saw, but, you know, his, his trailer, you know, caught fire and such, you know, and he's like, man, I'm so grateful that I have an employee. So now he connects. at least still work. If he didn't, he'd be totally toast right now.

You know, that was that was what was in my head was basically like, Nick, you got to get past that mentality, because if something happens, who's going to be bringing in money? You can only live off that what you've made. So so long. Yeah. You've got other people, then y'all can kind of feed off each other. You may end up having something you need to go do. They take over everything. They may have something they need to go do. You come fill in. Yeah, maybe everybody just works together. Yeah, exactly.

It's you know with you create a team and when you have that mentality You know It's really great. There is a a real biblical principle that I learned years ago as I was pastoring. We call it the Nehemiah principle. And Nehemiah had a vision, right? But he had to kind of constantly keep redoing that vision over and over again to really realize what he's doing. But he was called to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem and such. He's like, there's no way I can build this wall. And so there was a principle that I learned. He had to let go without letting up. So he had to let go of the process, but he was the one who was in charge of making sure that wall was built. And so as an entrepreneur, that's our goal. We need to learn how to let go. And so one of the things that I try to tell young entrepreneurs is ask yourself, what can you give away? There's some things that you can't, you have to do. As an entrepreneur, you have to do certain things. But I don't have to do my books. I can give that away to an accountant. I can hire an assistant to do the phone calls coming in and set up my appointments and such. I can give that away. I don't have to do that stuff. It takes a little bit of time because you have to train that person. But once you train that person, now you do well. But there's certain things I can't give away. People want to talk to me with high-low solutions about the equipment. They don't want to talk to my employees, you know what I'm saying? They want to talk to me because they know that I'm the expert in it, you know what I'm saying? And I get guys calling me up all the time going, hey, how do you sign these machines together and such? I got my local shop literally yesterday, a local shop called me from Alabama, or no, Louisiana. And the guy goes, man, what the heck are you doing? How are you doing this?

There's a lot of people that message me all the time and are like, take a picture of your block. So I can see the block. And then, and then you'll see, I guess, like, I guess they try to mimic it or whatever, because I'm not going to take a picture of it, but somehow they're zooming in on it. And I guess they try to mimic it. And dude, you'll see some of these things that they throw together and it just looks like shit. Yeah. It's not even a block. It's just like a two tubes going into each other. What the hell is that? It looks like it's going to blow.

Using brass and stuff. Yeah, you know, and, and that's the thing. It's like a lot of guys, you know, they, I get it, you know, they try to cut corners and stuff, but it's like, you know, you know, but, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier, there's some things you could give away some things you can't. And that's what you really need to ask yourself as an entrepreneur. And then you need to be able to try to build it from there. And so now, when I give something away, guess what? It gives me some more free time to do other things. And then so I have to look at what do I do best. And you get to a point... I'm 57 years old. So the older I get, I guess, you kind of get wiser, you learn from your other businesses, you learn from your other mistakes. When I restarted Pressure Perfection, it took off right away because I learned stuff when I stopped what I was doing before. And so when I restarted, I just restarted boom from fresh and but I started doing the things the right way from the very beginning, having the right equipment, you know, I know a lot of guys go, Oh, don't spend so much money on equipment. Well, I kind of disagree, not because I'm an equipment company, but I disagree because you still need to have at least some good equipment to be able to do a housewash, you know, definitely, you know, a faster and such, you know, spending, you know, $500 on a pressure washer and spending $3,000 make it happen somehow

You know, it's great on our aspect to speed up our, our deal. But at the end of the day, I don't really think customers at the end of the day, quite care what we have is equipment wise. It's just a matter of if you can sell yourself to that customer and then believing in you to be able to do the job, they don't care what you got. But at the end of the day, it does matter on our end to make our life easier. Because there was for the longest time, I was just constantly walking with that big guy on down big aprons, dude. And I was just like, dude, this is not what you're supposed to be doing. I mean, you could get a bigger surface cleaner or you could get more labor out there. But then it got to where it was like, I don't want to have a lot of labor. I much have better equipment, less labor, us making more profits and us getting things done faster. And that's exactly what your equipment does. Exactly. Those same, those same aprons that were taking me 21 hours, sometimes two, three days going out there. Um, we were getting it done in like six hours. I told myself the last time we went to go clean one, we could probably do two in one day.

Yeah, I know. It's crazy. But, you know, the amazing thing that blows me away with a lot of pressure cleaning companies and such is, you know, I'm not trying to knock them or anything, but their mentality is that equipment costs you money. equipment doesn't really cost you money if it's good equipment. Okay, equipment should be just like an investment. And it's an ROI, you know, and so you should be able to get a return on investment on that. And so if you look at it that way, you know, years, years ago, I wanted to buy when you know, surface painters first came out, so we had a 19 inch in the beginning, and it wasn't a whisper wash, actually, it was a it was called a Mori. Enterprise one down here in Boca. Then about six months later, they came out with a 28-inch one. It was about 1,200 or 1,500 bucks actually. I told my wife I wanted to buy it because we were doing a lot of big driveways and stuff like that. She's like, ''Oh, we can't afford it.'' And I looked at her and I said, can't afford not to have it. And she's like, what? And I said, look, I said, we got this credit card. I'm going to put this thing on credit card. I'm going to pay that thing off in less than a month. And she's like, no way. And she's like, that thing's not going to get paid off that fast. And so what I did was and I tell guys all the time, I put twenty five dollars a job. Every time I use that stinking thing, I put twenty five dollars away within six days. No, no, it wasn't $25. It was, I did $50 a job within, it was two week period that thing was paid for. It was just it's crazy. You know, it doesn't take that long to pay for equipment if it's good equipment, you know, saying, and I mean, look at you with the the beast and stuff. I mean, people are telling you you're crazy to buy that thing and crazy to buy, you know, get the whole rig redone and everything. And now you're calling me up and going, Hey, man, I'm I'm really considering getting the other truck done now.

It's literally increased our revenue and our time on being able to do things. Now, on the post-construction cleanups, originally, they just wanted us to do sidewalks and curbs and breezeways on some places and then basically the porches and then do the red clay around the building. Well, they also have to have line striping done. Well, all that parking lot gets annihilated with all that red clay after they have it paved. And there's nothing that they can really do about it. It's just sods, not down red clays right there. The, the curbs are already there. The sidewalks there, the pavings there, and all of that just gets red clay on it. So then they were like. We're tired of having our guys out here cleaning the asphalt after we have you clean all this other stuff because then it just has one marks everywhere. Oh, and I said, well, we can clean it. And we've been doing it traditionally and we would get it to where it had very, very vague. One marks, but it still had some, and then bring out that beast and you ride that beast on there and you just pick up the pan and you can ride it over and it loosens everything up to where somebody can come back through and actually just ball valve rents and all that loose dirt actually gets pushed off. And there's no. Fan marks, none of that stuff. Nice. Right there. Increased our our ticket on a job that I already had set in stone for a price. They turned around and came back and said, yes, add that on and just add that on to every job that we do from now on. Wow. Nice. OK.

Oh, shot around.

And it's funny, all these guys come out and they're all checking this stuff out and they're like, do you need to patent that thing? I'm like, it's not mine.

Yeah, people are amazed by it, but you know, like you even said, you know, you're actually getting jobs more because of our equipment.

Oh, I actually am. There's certain people don't get me wrong. There are certain people that'll hit you up and be like, I just want you to come out because you have that equipment and we know you're not going to take up hardly any of our time. Wow. There's some actual, um, car washes that are like that. And I haven't really locked in the deal with them or whatever, but they've hit me up a few times and was like, hey, we don't want nothing but the beast because we basically only have a six hour window for somebody to come clean. And all these traditional pressure washing guys that go out there and clean, they're just taking up several days and hours of their time.

Yeah. And the bad thing is, is if they're doing it in days, they're talking, uh, by the time, whatever they cleaned by the time they're still finished, it's already dirty again, because there's was saying, and I'm in the middle of working up one.

That's got a few of them around us. They do it themselves, but they said by the time they get done, it's like, they've got to turn around and go back and start over where they first started because it's already starting to get dirty. Exactly. I'm like, just let me come in and clean it. It'll only take me like three or four hours. I'll have this thing completely clean. And then your process won't start as fast.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Car washes are great money. I guess spending the money because I mean, I did price it at around like $3,500 or something like that for us. Probably too high. Yeah. We'll talk. I priced it too high. Yeah.

We can talk more about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you want to be able to make it appealing where you can get in and out, you know, for them to, you know, but so but yeah, no, our equipment is, I mean, I love it. It's, you know, back in 2020, when I made the first beast for a friend of mine, first piece that we sold, should I say, the guy looked at me and he says, man, He goes, what are you doing? I said, what do you mean? He goes, you need to be selling this stuff. He goes, when you talk about, he goes, he goes, you talk about your pressure spending business and you kind of share what's going on. He goes, you're kind of excited. He goes, when you talk about the equipment, you're like, you're like all over the place, man. He goes, you're, you're passionate about it. You can tell, you know, and I tell guys a lot of times when we do with our equipment and stuff, I'm like, look, you know, I want to help you make more money. That's what my goal is. Our whole philosophy is, like you said, better efficiency reduces labor costs and increases profitability. You see it firsthand. You've had this thing since October and what it's done for your business already. But the thing is, A lot of guys just think I'm trying to sell it. I'm like, no, I've told people you're not ready for the beast yet. I've tried to talk people out of buying it sometimes because they're not ready and such, business-wise and also mindset-wise. But if they have the work, I tell guys all the time, it should be a no-brainer. I know it sounds like a lot of money to buy the whole rig and everything else, but man, find a way because if you've got that money coming in, that's why we teamed up with that finance company for that reason, because it was like, get the equipment now and let your jobs pay for itself over some time so you're not strapping yourself financially and taking all your savings away and stuff. And so it's not really foolish to do that if you have the work. If you don't have the work, then yeah, that's foolish. But if you do have the work, make it happen because you're making so much more money with the beast than you are trying to do it and then trying to save up for it type thing. And guys don't get that. I had one guy, love him to death, he's a great kid and such, and he, He's out in Texas and he went ahead and bought the Beast. He saved up, bought the Beast, but he didn't have the rig for it. He had a 5.5 gallon of pressure washer. I said, well, what are you going to do? He's like, I got to go ahead and I'm saving up now to go ahead and buy the 310s and do it that way and everything else and build a whole new rig. It took him eight months to do it. with a 5.5 gallon a minute machine, bro.

And I said to him, I said, Jade, I said, man, I love you, but man, you know, if you would have taken out a loan, you would have paid this thing off and you would have been not killing yourself with a 5.5 gallon a minute while the stinking beast is sitting in your garage collecting dust.

And you're talking to yourself the whole time, like, damn, that thing would make life so much better.

Oh, he called me the other day. He called me the other day and he goes, man, he was he was talking to me about doing some subcontracting work and what to do and how to price it and stuff.

And, you know, you know, just like, you know, we have a great relationship. And a lot of my guys, they call me up, they talk to me about business and such. And it's not just, hey, I sell them and they're gone. You know, we build a build a relationship with a lot of these guys. And he called me up the other day and was talking to me about how his how his business is growing.

He's like, man, I can't believe I was using a 5.5 gallon machine because I don't even like to go down to a 10. Because I'll have to I spray chemical down sometimes with a 10 and you guys, I feel like it's a stinking garden hose.

That's exactly what we do. I can't go over to the other truck and go to the other truck and use it. And I'm sitting there pulling the ball valve up and down like, come on, where's the power? There ain't no power here. And then I go over to 17 and I'm just like.

Yeah, I know.

I know. And it's it's crazy. But, you know, a lot of guys, they don't they see it on videos and stuff and they don't realize really what I think it could do.

You know, I think it's overpower. You don't need all of this. You don't need all of that. Yeah. But at the same time, it's also just depends on what you're what you really want out of pressure washing. You know, if you're just going to wash some houses, no, you don't need it. Yeah.

Believe it or not, we used to wash houses with 21 gallons a minute.

I see Garfield doing that. That's what he was saying to me. And then I watched him.

He's just sitting in a lounge chair.

I went to a house one time to show a guy. He had a four gallon a minute machine. And so I went to show him what the 21 gallons a minute would do. And we were doing a two story house. And I literally stepped back. with the wand and I just took the tip off and I hit the whole edge of the tiles, the whole entire two-story, right? And it was like a long two-story. I was sitting in the middle and I hit the whole thing from just the middle and then I rinsed the thing down and I walked away and the guy looked at me and goes, that would have taken me like an hour to do with this four gallon machine.

And he goes, you did it in less than like two minutes. You know, so.

But anyway, yeah. So what's been the hardest part of all of this?

You know, the pressure cleaning and the paper sealing, you know, obviously the the hardest part with those two businesses have been seasons. You know, the seasons, you know, the down here in Florida, we have fall, no winter, spring. And those two seasons are great. OK. And then summer sucks for us, you know. And so we tell people, you know, we survive summer, basically, you know. And so you have to be wise enough to kind of learn how what those seasons are. So far with the the equipment business, what's been the toughest, I would say, is Is number one, it's a different niche. So it's learning how to market now to this niche. Okay. That's one thing. But the other thing has been is just keeping up with inventory, because we have to have so many things. I mean, bro, we went through 400 ends for our tornado bars. That means 100 tornado bars went out from March to the end of April. And they called me up, and we were in Italy, man. And they text me, and they said, hey, we're out of ends. Can you order some? I said, what? You better go through all those boxes. There's no way we are out of ends, because we put on the last box order when we're low. And sure enough, man, I went through all our orders. We had like 60 just regular surface cleaner orders that we did. And then the Beast, all our other surface cleaners, what, like 120 surf, tornado bars went out. And within a month and a half, and I was blown away. So trying to keep up with it, it was great. I mean, I was like- That is really nice. I mean, you're talking like $25,000 worth of tornado, just tornado bars went out, you know?

Everybody that's buying them from you is all out talking good about you because you're obviously picking up business from people.

Oh, yeah. Tremendously. I mean, one one guy alone on the paper ceiling groups, Tim bought one. He's local guy. He posted that thing. And I think within I posted the pictures of videos of it and stuff and just said, hey, I'm going to give you an honest review of this thing. And he ended up buying another one for his other machine because he was like, heck with this, man. This thing's awesome, you know? and he's only running 19-inch surface cleaners for his eight-gallon machines for paper sealing, but he was blown away how great the thing was. Off of him alone, we probably had like 20 sales, just that one guy. I think the cool thing has been is with the pressure cleaning groups that we do and everything else, I think we're definitely getting a good name out there, and we have a good brand, and people are recognizing our quality. In the beginning, people weren't really buying our single surface cleaners, the 26-inch and the 28-inch, and we're coming out with a 20-inch one now for the smaller guys.

You can make a little 16.

Yeah, I'm thinking about it. But a lot of guys didn't want to spend the money because ours are a whole lot more money than Whisperwash and different ones. And I get it, but now guys are buying them because they're using their friends or whoever bought them, and they're like, this is totally different quality. They can see it now. You know, so our name is really getting out there, you know, doing, yeah, we're higher end, you know, we're going to be that Cadillac or Lamborghini, you know, type thing. But we're not going to be, you know, we're not going to be cheaper, but we're definitely going to be much better quality, you know, surface cleaners are going to hold up forever. Yeah, we had one, I don't know if I told you, my guy, when I approached Cleaning Company, I was hanging on the trailer, he hit a pothole, the thing went up in the air, fell down, the trailer drove over top of the thing.

Right?

Drove over top of the swivel. and the surface cleaner. The surface cleaner bent like crazy, okay. Brush was totally ruined, obviously. Tornado bar swivel was fine. The dome, I was like, man, he's like, man, I'm so sorry.

We'll have to buy another one. I'm like, no, we don't. Watch this. Took a hammer, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, took it out. You couldn't even tell it was bent.

my pressure cream and go be that the guy who bought it still has that thing today. And that thing was we bought, we built that in 2014, the very first surface spinner.

You know, you're talking over 10 years old, man.

Yeah, I think the cadet would probably shit out before the surface cleaner.

Fuck, I need a new cadet. Just slap the same one up under it. Keep on going.

And, you know, people hear those people go, oh, you know, why don't you use a commercial grade Walmart? I did it.

You're not you're not doing thousands of hours of lawns.

You know, that's what nobody really gets. And that's what made that one video go viral is is everybody got on there from the lawn company cares or whatever and started dogging it, saying, why you got a cadet, blah, blah, blah. Why are you using a steering wheel? That's not a real zero turn. You should get a real zero turn. It would be better. and get you something better quality than that cadet. Then you got people going on there, man, finally good to see the cadets actually doing something good for somebody. Then I think it even got to where there was somebody that worked for cadet or something like that in like the main hub warehouse type thing. And he was like, holy shit, y'all really customized those things.

We had a Mike Kilgore from Trident was at some kind of event like in Tennessee, like a reunion or something, right? And he's talking to this lady and he's asking her what she does and everything else. And what does your husband do? And she goes, He works for some like lawn company, Cadet. And he goes, you mean Cub Cadet? And she goes, yeah. And he's like the regional salesman for all of Southeast. And Mike beelines over to him, right? And he wants to talk to him. And then Mike pulls out his video. He goes, you ever see this? And Mike was using it. And the guy goes, yeah.

He goes, how do you know that? And he goes, he's a good friend of mine that makes those things. He goes, man, this thing has been going viral in our company. He goes, and Mike told me, man, when you're down in West Palm Beach, he goes, give this guy a call and come see it, man. He goes, it's great. He goes, he took what you guys made and used it for a different purpose. You know? Yeah.

They probably never thought of anything like that. They're like, Oh, just straight lawn care, lawn care, pressure, anything like this.

So, yeah, it's great. But yeah, we're coming out with some new equipment. We just came out with I don't know if you saw that one, the strippinator.

The big dome on it or whatever.

Yeah, it's you know, it's for tornado bar. It's a tornado bar with four turbos under that thing. And so it actually digs in down.

Yeah, great.

Yeah, it does really well, getting guys loving it. Man, we sold, I put a pre-order thing out post and told them that we got 10 coming and literally posted on a Saturday. By Monday, all 10 were sold, bro. Then I updated the post and put in bold letters, hey, we're sold out. The next 10 are probably not going to be coming till June sometime because supply chain, certain things like brushes and stuff that we're waiting on. And we already got seven of them sold for pre-orders that I didn't even, I haven't been pushing it at all.

You know, we got seven of them, paving ceiling companies out there. And once they catch onto that, that's going to be another big niche right there. I see. I noticed that a lot of those guys are just like when they go to strip, man, they make a mess. That stuff really does make a mess or whatever. And they're sitting there just using those turbo nozzles or whatever. And they're splattering everything. I'm like, dude, you're annihilating the fucking house, the cars, the trees, the bushes.

Everything. It's a mess.

And I'm sure that stuff's Xenix and doesn't really come off very easy off other things.

No, and that's why this is going really well. See, when Garfield was stripping, we used 21 and 31 gallons a minute to strip, but we used a surface cleaner and we designed some certain tips for his because it was even more crazy. But I was, I'm afraid to actually try to use those tips to sell. Um, there's a certain Sapphire tips are called and, uh, they're used for like cutting metal and cutting concrete with these guys using 40,000 PSI and stuff like that. It's crazy stuff that they use.

So Debbie's it down on the other thing or whatever, when he's actually using it because it's made for more, right. More than what he's actually pushing through it.

Right. And so for 30 with 31 gallons a minute, it was great. You know, and he would rip through, he would do a thousand square foot, you know, driveway, he would strip that thing in about a half an hour after, you know, just pressure painting wise, you know? And, um, and so guys would take that same size. It would take them like all day long to do that. I've had guys.

Well, I was about to say that's fast because some of those guys, there's like one whole day that they take or sometimes more stripping.

And you you've used a turbo nozzle before. I think your arm is killing your wrist, your elbow, everything's dying after a while. And they say they're not really good for your carpal tundra syndrome stuff, you know. So, but, um, so this surface cleaner, that's really cool. What's great about it is so far the reviews I'm getting is they're loving it because they can go next to a garage door and it's not killing the garage door. They're going through it and it's stripping really easy, so it's making a mess inside the dome. Problem is, guys have to stay on top of it as they got to clean it out in between jobs, in between times because it does start making a balance, unfortunately. But I'd rather have that than have a stinking mess that you got to clean up like crazy. That's a neat feature, a new surface clear that we just came out with. A thing that we're going to be doing on the beast, I don't know if I ever told you, but it's in the works right now. Hopefully, we should have it next week. It goes on the side of the surface cleaner. When you're next to a wall, say doing a parking garage and such, you turn on that extra ball valve and it will cut in the edge for you.

That would be very key because that's one thing that I'm not able to do. When I go to rinse down, For the most part, the ball valve, 34 gallons per minute can kind of clean up those little edges or whatever. I can definitely tell that I'm leaving about that much space just for the fact that you don't want to get next to those stoppers or whatever. I actually shot a video while I was doing it and I was like, damn, I'm super close to this thing, but it still just leaves that little gap. You got to go back and kind of. So if it would have that on there, that would help out a lot.

Yeah, that's going to be a great one. And the other thing is, when you were talking about your roads and stuff is our rinsing system. So we're working on one right now. And Jose Ortiz has one for his. I literally just talked to him on Friday. He's a good friend of mine. He's going to help me kind of develop it even a little bit better. But he understands the concept of what I want. So we're making one. The way I'm going to make it, which is going to be really cool, I'm going to make it so it goes on the back of the beast. So when you're running 34 gallons a minute, you could actually be pressure cleaning and rinsing at the same time.

It's already pushing some, but if it had a bar in the back, it would definitely push the rest. Exactly.

It keeps the flow going. Exactly. That's what we discovered with it. But the way we're designing that ours is like his goes back and forth, you know, type thing. We're designing ours where when say like you're on the right hand side of the road, okay, it will have an actuator so it will turn this way. All right, and it will push all the dirt into the dirty section. when you like if you're in a parking lot garage and you turn around now you hit the button to go down or it will be right and left you push it and it will turn it to the other way now it will go ahead and push the dirt back into the dirty section again.

I get what you're saying because it's constantly pushing down downwards instead of back into the which is a section you already cleaned. So you still have a little bit of residue left to go back and rinse, but it'll be very, very vague.

So little. I mean, and, you know, pushing the heavy dirt is what sucks. You know what I'm saying?

All the time. And you can sit there and clean everything in like a couple 30 minutes, an hour or whatever. But then you go to rinse down all that and you're like, damn, I just spent like three or four hours.

with 34 gallons a minute, it's easier to rent.

Yeah, but it's still if you can, you know, that's what we're trying to do. So we're, we're pretty confident that thing's going to be out probably by the end of July. And I'm hoping to bring it to the huge convention, you know, type day because that's that that changes things even more so for guys, because now it becomes a complete unit, it can cut in, it can go ahead and pressure clean, and you can rinse at the same time. You know, I mean, it's it's already great as it is. Now we're just making improvements to it to even make it better, you know. So we're constantly doing that we tell guys all the time, we're like, listen, if you have an idea, you know, the high low solutions, the word solutions is that that's what we do. You know, we want to come up with solutions to make your job easier and stuff, you know, and if we can come up with something, you know, I got a guy that had is doing the you know, the street gutters, right? And he calls me up and he says, Yeah, but I saw your street gutter cleaner only does like flat stuff. And I said, yeah. And he says, well, he goes, let me show you a picture. So he showed me a picture. He's got these street gutters that are like on a 15 degree angle. And I went, crap, what do we do? So I called my fabricator up. And I said, man, we got to figure out a way how to do this. And we came up with a new bracket to tilt his stinking swellinator up on a 15 degree angle now for the guy. You know, and it's like, you know, so we come up with solutions, even if it's not something that we're going to sell all the time, you know, and that didn't cost us really anything, you know, any difference. But, you know, that's why some of the stuff, it's, it's sometimes just little tweaks, you know, to make it better, you know? And so, but, you know, and my desire is to make things better for you guys. I, you know, yes, we make money at it, but man, I, I get, I get more blessed when Nick calls me up and says, man, we just did X, X amount of dollars today.

Seriously. I really do.

The only thing I wish I would have done with this company is I, I would have put in some kind of a royalty fee with you guys.

You got to buy this, but you got to get a side right here at the end of every year, turn around and send me this check this month. sold like a thousand of those things. We're just going to sit back and just live off this.

You know, it would've been awesome to put on like a half a cent a square foot.

You know, I've got guys do a million square foot parking lots. I'm like, Hey, that's up after a while, man.

It says they're not, they're not making money on these things after, you know, cleaning some big parking lots and having big projects. They're dumb.

Well, most of them that aren't, if they're not making money with it, they're not going after it. Yeah. And they should be, because I got one guy that told me he made five, six grand in one day doing just a small job. It wasn't a real big job. He was all excited. And then I call him up. I'm like, how's it going? And he's like, oh, man, that beast has been sitting in the garage for like three months.

I'm like, Dude, so you bought it for just one or two jobs?

I'm like, that makes no sense to me. And then he's telling me that his business isn't doing that great on his other side, the residential side. I'm like, dude, there is so much stinking commercial work out there. But then he'll come in and he tries to bid on these jobs the same price that he was bidding on them when he was using a 28-inch surface planer. I'm like, dude, you can do it so much faster. So why are you going ahead and trying to get top, top dollar for every job? Just get jobs. When that beast is running, you're making money. It don't matter.

You know? So you're making $500 an hour or $1,000 an hour or $300 an hour. Who cares? You're making money. If it's sitting in the garage, you're making zero, you know?

Yeah. Nobody really, a lot of people don't have that hustle on them. They think that this, because they have this equipment, that the jobs are going to come to them. And it doesn't, if you can't sell yourself, man, at the end of the day, you're not going to have nothing. So you got to have that drive to know that you have the confidence in yourself to know that, Hey, yeah, I can sell to them. I just need to get in front of them. Right.

We had a guy that bought it, Austin in Alabama, and he had a vision to go after car washes. And he's the one I could probably hook you up with to talk to a little bit. And he went ahead and he didn't have any car washes whatsoever. But he had the vision, he bought the base. I was reluctant to sell it to him because I was like, man, I hope this guy, but he had cash. So I was like, all right, you know, you're not killing yourself. He goes, No, I have it in savings. Everything else I've been saving up because we've been doing residential. He goes, I don't want to do this. I want to go strictly commercial. So all right, he goes, but I have to have the equipment to be able to go after it. So he started taking some of my videos before we even built him his rig. He put the deposit down. And he went to these car washers and said, Hey, I'm buying this equipment. I want to do your work. The guy goes, come here. Do a demo when you get it. He gets that thing the first weekend he's out to these car washes doing a demo. And they told him work up a price. The guy in the first year picked up I believe about 32 car washes, because that's what he did. But he went after it. But he like you said he had a hustle he wanted better for his family and such you know and he wanted he had that drive to do it you know and so he's in with some of the bigger chains and such and so he's been kind of talking about trying to develop like a a network basically of beast owners to do in the different areas because he can't do it you know but he's already in with them and such that might be the guy that hit me up

There was a guy that hit me up that wanted me to ask me that if I would pick and service some some car washes, I was there. Yeah, he does. And these people just want the beast to come out there because it only takes X amount of hours for the beast to actually get it done where they got six hour windows. Right.

Yeah, that was it.

I didn't hear much more back from him after that. I think he was trying to work up something with multiple states and stuff like that. Places on the. Yeah.

Yeah, I actually called him the other day to try to find out what's he doing and everything else and how things are going. He had a baby, a lot of things last year, so I don't know how he did. But yeah, he's a great guy. But again, you have to have that hustle, man. I think a lot of guys, really, Nick, too, what it really boils down to is you got to have a clear vision. I don't care what it is. Whatever business you're in, pressure washing, the lights, Christmas lights, whatever it is, you got to have a vision of that. It's not just going to happen because you come up with the name of a company and all of a sudden, hey, light's gone wild. You got to go after it now. You got to market to your customers, you got to do certain things, you got to go after it to make that happen, and you got to set yourself some goals. A lot of young entrepreneurs, they don't get that and they just go by the seat of their pants and whatever comes in, they don't really plan, they don't plan their marketing. They'll just go ahead and throw money down the drain a lot of times because they're not really being strategic in what they're doing. The other thing too, this is really important for a lot of companies to get is, A lot of times, owning a whole business in general is very overwhelming. You know that, right? You've got to do sales. You've got to figure out marketing. You've got to do all this type of stuff. Then you've got to get the work done when you get the jobs. And sometimes it's like a rat race, you feel like, you know what I'm saying? But one of the things that I've always done that's probably, I think, has made us very successful personally, and it's taken off a lot of stress off of me in business in general, is I've created systems. to do different parts of what we do in our business. So we have a sales system. The sales system, I look over how we do our marketing. What do we do when the calls come in? How do we get the estimates scheduled? This is all part of that whole plan. We have a CRM that we can track and make sure that we're doing what we're doing on our sales and everything else. it's real important to have a system in place. Does it have to be something that you write down all that other stuff? No, for me, I have it in my head and we talk it through with my team and such, my admins and everything. You can work through stuff like that. The great thing about it is, right now, for me, for my business, Inventory has been a little bit of a challenge for us. And because we have so many parts and stuff. So right now, my one daughter works in the shop with us now, but she was my admin before for paver, but she works in the shop. My other daughter has always been my admin from pressure and then working paver. And now she helps us with this business now, you know, and, but they know my mindset. And they're like, Dad, we got to figure out a way how to do inventory differently. I'm like, let's do it. Let's tackle this. So we're trying to come up with sheets. We're trying to come up with different ways. We're trying to come up with a mentality for the team. When that last box that we write on there, please order, we need to go ahead and order those when. We need to go through at least kind of see when we ordered them last and then how long it's taken, like those ends on those tornado bars. I'm like, crap, we got to order more of these instead, you know, so we're trying to learn that stuff. But what we were doing with that is my main point is we're creating a system that's going to make it work. It takes a little bit of time to figure out that system. Once you get that system down, now it goes, it works like clockwork. And so the same thing is like with your team with working, you know, the you know with the pressure cleaning and you're going to do that now with the Christmas lights the same thing you got to figure out systems so those systems now once you you create the way you want it done because you're the owner you that's something that you have to do you can use your team to collaborate what you want to do But, and you don't have to be always in charge, but you still have to make the final decision, okay? So now once you create that system, now anybody can work that system. Then it could be rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. The more you do that system, now I have other guys training my guys because they know the system. Right. So no matter what it is, if it's in the field, if it's in my shop, whatever it is, if you create those systems and kind of what you're doing is you're you ever hear the old adage? How do you how do you eat an elephant? No, no, no. One bite at a time. Okay. So what I'm doing is, is I'm eating the elephant. It's way bigger than I could even handle this whole business thing. But if I can take things and I can go ahead and shrink them down, now it makes it a little bit more better for my brain, especially like you with your brain sometimes you talk about, right? Now you simplify things, but you're making it in small parts, small bites.

Right. Nah, I understand. I can know exactly where you're coming from because my mind runs that same exact way. Right. You have to, you have to simplify it. You just got to keep on going and keep on going. And I didn't learn systems until I had goats and stuff like that. So then everything started going a lot smoother.

You have to, you know, but business is, uh, You know, this year, bro, we so 22 is when we started the business. We did pretty decent year. That first year, I was really pleased. You know, I had to two businesses going at the time. So and paver was exploding. So I had to be real careful how much time I put into high low. Then last year, we did four and a half times. growth what we did the first year. Okay. So, which was great. This year. All right. We're already at 85% of what we did all of last year. and it's at the end of June, coming up to the end of June.

That's exactly where we're at. Everything that we did last year, we met in month five. So now everything for the next, what, seven months is going to be all profit or extra revenue.

Yeah, it's crazy. So it's been neat to see. The neat thing is we're not just reaching now pressure washing companies and paper sealing companies. We just sold one rig to the city in Jackson, Tennessee. They saw our equipment and said, ''Hey, we pressure clean all of our city now, and so we need something better.'' So we went up there and did a training for them. Then I went to St. Louis, a car wash company. It's gas station and car wash combined, but they're about 50,000-60,000 square foot each property. You know, so it's a big deal. So his guys are doing the pressure cleaning. And he said they would do like, you know, just the parking spots in front of the store. And it would take them like all night.

And they would do a bay, you know, next to the gas stops and stuff or in between, you know, two of them or whatever.

And they said it would take them like four or five hours to do it by one guy. And we went to the training for them. He bought one. He had five gas stations. So he was like, I want to keep these things clean. We did the bay in like less than five minutes. And then they were like, you gotta be kidding me. And all these guys were telling him that, you know, you're crazy to spend this much money on this thing.

And the guy's like, no way, you know, I want to keep people having a nice, nice environment. Yeah.

And that's what he wants. And he, and you, when you see his buildings and stuff, they're top notch, you know, they're always clean, everything else. Um, and now the next trailer that we're building right this second, um, is actually going to the university of Alabama. That is really cool. They've been renting a cyclone for the last couple of years down their parking garages and stuff, and didn't really like it, but they needed something a little bit better than what they were doing before. They came up at the huge convention actually, and they contacted me before then, and then they came to the huge convention just to see our equipment. And so him and his engineer, and so they went through the whole process takes a while to do. And so we got the approval like two months ago, and started doing all the ordering and stuff of all the equipment and everything else. But so we're reaching new entities. which is really, really cool. I got an oil company that has a bunch of gas stations that they do their own pressure washing. I got an airport. I've got one guy in Puerto Rico that's getting a government contract that he's wanting a whole beast rig maybe sent over to him. I got one guy in Guam that's been contacting me for the last year and a half and I told him, I said, man, I said, it's not if, it's just when.

That's not it, it's just win. It'll be nationwide, high-low solutions.

Oh, I know. We've been getting some inquiries in Australia, which is really cool. But those type of things, a little challenging because of just the shipping stuff and everything. So one of the things that we're coming up with, especially for the guy in Puerto Rico, is we're talking to him about possibly making a skid. Okay, okay. So making two skids. So one will be all the pressure washing equipment with the hose reel, the gas tank, the battery box, everything, then another skid will be the water tank. Oh, nice. So now any trailer he buys, he can go ahead and put them on. And then we'll have like, like, like maybe some cam locks or something to put for the water stuff. So that may be something, a new development coming out that may take, take fire because now we can ship it internationally a lot easier. Okay. Put it in a container. So, you know, we're, we're always thinking, you know, different things and what we can do, you know, so it's exciting.

Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you about everything. I've got to go to the bathroom. So I can't say more. Um, I greatly appreciate you getting on here early this morning and explaining everything that you've got going on. It's been a pleasure talking about all of it. Sounds like you're going to be crushing it here soon and have been crushing it and continue. Uh, I met you two years ago at the huge convention and it was a blessing meeting you then. And I told you that I would buy it by your equipment. And sure enough, that's what I, what I did. And it's helped me out a lot. But if you could explain to everybody how they can find you. Yeah.

Our website is highlowsolutions.com. You can call me on my cell as many people know, I try to help out anybody I can even if they're not buying from me. My telephone number is 561-779-3291. My name is Mike Arnone, I'm the owner of the company. We're also going to be at the huge convention. We've got a big booth coming up. Um, we're going to bring a bunch of our equipment. We're going to bring a bunch of tornado bars. Um, I'm going to probably tell a lot of guys if they want us to, to bring any equipment specifically that they want to buy to do like maybe a pre-order and such. So this way I can bring it there. Cause a lot of guys are up that way so they can save on shipping.

You know, that's definitely what I'm going to do. I'm already thinking in my head when I want you to bring up for the huge. So that was my plan.

So, yeah, so we're looking forward to it. We're probably going to bring, we're bringing a full rig, uh, with the beast on it and everything. And then we're bringing a bunch of different surface cleaners that we got, you know, the newer ones and stuff as well. And then, uh, we're probably, it looks like we're going to have to bring another whole nother trailer full, you know, like a big trail, like you got, you know, to put everything in just the extra stuff, which is a cool problem to have.

It's awesome. Problem to have can't complain there. Uh, but anyway, well, uh, guys that's, that's the end of this show. You know where to find him. And, uh, once again, thank you again for coming on here.

My pleasure, brother, man. Take care. All right. You too.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. And remember, pressure doesn't break you, it makes you. Until next time, friends.