[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media at jt literally. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals, build stronger relationships and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational funnels. We booked 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, outreach or social posting. We found a new way to close deals in 2025 that doesn't rely on any of those tired old methods we're used to. To learn more, you can download the free step by step
[email protected] Today's guest is Royal Mortier. He's the founder of Claris and its subsidiaries. He specializes in serving home builders with plans, renderings, marketing and delivery. Royal, welcome to Big Ticket Pros. What is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's funny you brought that up. I'm actually, I'm having a meeting with somebody you and I both know that his daughter is interested in and coming into our field, into the home design field. So definitely something I've been thinking about and really I would do. I would, I would hit on two things. One more business and then one really just a general business item and then one more overarching with what, what we do or really can be applied to a lot of businesses.
One is nobody's your competition. Like the.
I'm a very competitive person and I look at my children and they're super competitive. And you know, I was a wrestler, I trained jiu jitsu. And you get in the mindset when you first start in any of those things that everybody's your competition, anybody in your weight class is your competition. And you know, or anytime you go into practice, you're competing against everybody else and that's not the case. Don't worry. Get me wrong, it's great to have a competitive nature, but the fact of the matter is, is there are people in my industry or people that I overlap with that they're not my competition. They're actually somebody that can assist me and I can assist them. You know, it's, it's a, it's a, that business to business. Even when we're under the same kind of umbrella or categorization of work to where we can assist each other. I have a certain specialty that not other people have. I Have a certain ability with our, our ability to mass deliver that other people don't have. And that's, that's a strength that I have. Whereas somebody coming to me for a one off situation, I may not be the right person for that. You know, we averaged over 100 homes a month delivered this last year.
If somebody is coming to me with a one off position in a state we, or jurisdiction we've never worked in or anything like that, I'm more likely to connect them with somebody in that, that I know in that area than me take it on myself because that person I know is going to be able to better deliver to them. So don't treat everybody as your competition. And I guess secondary to that is don't try and take on other things that you know are going to basically hold you back, be able to say no. And then the other main point is start with your foundation first.
Your foundation of how you deliver to your clients is the key thing that's going to allow you to grow. If as a structural engineer, we always start with the foundation, if the foundation fails, it doesn't really matter what's above it that that's going to fail. And the most expensive thing to retrofit is the foundation. So get your foundation built right to begin with and everything else is gravy from there. We, this last year for 2024, we doubled our profit with only about a 30% increase in revenue. And the reason being is we invested in 2022 and 2023 significantly into our foundation and our ability to deliver projects more efficiently and more cost effectively to our clients. So when our volume massively increased, I didn't have to increase staff, I didn't have to increase programming, I didn't have to increase any of the things that were the overhead of my costs. So my revenue went up as a result, but my cost did not because I had that solid foundation.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: I think you hit on something really important there. First of all, there's a lot to unpack about what you shared when you were, when you were talking about staying focused on the things that are going to make an impact for you. I was reminded until, until about an hour ago, I had the book next to me, will it make the boat go Faster?
And, and that's what I was thinking of when you were saying that. Because as entrepreneurs we tend to go in all of these different directions and we really need to be asking ourselves that question. Every single decision that we're making. Will this make the boat go faster or not? If not, put it over There because we're going this way. I'm curious your thoughts on that. And then I want to impact the, the foundation thing because I have questions.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it is important, you know, really double down, look at what you're doing and double down on what's going to have the biggest impact on your business.
You know, we're, we're, we're starting a new forensics division and it's interesting. There's a bunch of companies and our focus is with engineering experts and other building experts within our forensics division. And that's our, that's the focus of the entire company. That's it. That's all it focuses on. And it's interesting. I've seen and met with other companies that they're like, oh yeah, we have an expert. And I'm like, okay, well what's your focus of your business? And it's like, well, we have this and we have this and we have this and we have this and like so you don't have a focus. You're literally just grabbing at everything that is in this overall arching umbrella of say construction defect or large loss claim work and trying to be.
Have something for everything that everybody needs.
And when it comes to a situation of in construction defect work or large loss work where we're not even touching stuff that's under typically a quarter or half a million dollars and really most of our stuff, most of the things we're touching are multiple millions of dollars of work or the, the, the size of the claim that's going to be is in the millions of dollars.
You don't want this person that. Oh well, I offer I have a expert, but that expert is working on 50 other projects.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: You know, and I have a claims adjuster and I have a. That.
What is it that you can focus on and grow? What is it that makes you know, what's your icky guy? What's the thing that crosses the. I can do it well and I love doing it.
And it's. If it doesn't meet, you know the Japanese term of icky guy, it doesn't meet in that Venn diagram.
Get rid of it. Because it's not going to make your business go faster. It's going to be a daunting task on you. Sure, you're going to make some money from it, but in the end it's going to hold you back from so much more.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And you're. Yeah. Get out of my head, royal man. Like you speaking, you're speaking to me. I've, I've Been in that situation so many times where I, you know, gotta, you can, you can make a quick buck just doing this thing, you know how to do.
You don't have the systems built for. You don't have the foundation built for it. And it's a, and it's a good segue into.
You gave really sound words of wisdom about the foundation is the most important part of the structure. Why do you think it is that an entrepreneur, even though we know that, even though we all live in a house, why is it that we don't invest the energy we really should into our foundation?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Because it's scary, right? I can easily. And I went through this this year and I also went through, I went through two different major growth phases about five or six years ago and then again with this year. So five or six years ago I was with a different company and that company was. When I got brought on with them, they were on the verge of shutting their doors.
And so at that point, my entire focus was essentially save the company, right? Get us to a point where we can produce, where we can produce revenue, produce, become profitable again, pay off our bad debts and get on, get, get in the, get in the black.
And then after about 18 months, we did that in 18 months, we tripled in size, we paid off our debt, we were on a massive positive trajectory. And at that point, I should have revisited and gone, hey, now that we're financially sustainable and stable, we can grow. But in order for us to grow, we need to significantly invest in our delivery to be more efficient, to be more productive. And I didn't do that. There were a ton of efficiencies that existed in that company when I came on. And instead of me addressing those as the, as a leader and hitting on them and investing the time to develop the SOPs, to develop, to improve our project delivery, to develop the things that we need to do to better serve our clients. And not only better serve our clients, better manage the projects within the team. So it was less headache and less time spent on that aspect of it.
I just continued to market for more work, right? Because that's, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to move the needle. If I had gone and said, hey, let's pull off the gas a little bit, let's take our profits, let's invest it in this foundation that's going to allow us to perform better five years from now, 10 years from now, it would have been a much, much better scenario. Instead, what happened is after multiple years of Us growing and growing and growing and not improving the foundation. We, the business was making a ton of money but it was extremely unstable and every day was just a chore to get projects out the door.
So when I, when I started my new company, I got us stabilized, I got us cash flowing and then I went okay, what we need to do, we now know what we can be in five to 10 years from now, we now need to make that investment. And you know why I say it was scary.
It was quarter million dollars, it was, you know, quarter million dollars and a lot of man hours over the course of about nine months to build out the foundation that we have. And then that's a foundation that we now continually add on to and improve on. Now with that said, I'm starting launching two more companies.
I am now able to duplicate that foundation that we built, carbon copy it, make some minor tweaks to it and launch it with a couple thousand dollar investment and a couple of weeks with maybe 100 man hours instead of building it all new.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: You've done the hard work and we.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Built the foundation and now it's also a foundation that we're probably going to eventually look at marketing to other engineering and architecture firms to help them better deliver because we've done all the hard work, we built it all out, we've developed it all and now we can help them have a better performing foundation. But with that said, because of that, because I did that, you know, this last year we, we made more than we ever made. We've added more clients in one year than we ever added. We've expanded into like 10 more states and I probably worked less than I ever have, which is a really, really nice feeling. So now I'm putting on that other cap of instead of me. You know, it's been a scary year because heck, you want me to do engineering, you want me to do plan delivery, you want me to market to people, you can want me to do those things where I almost have like a set task list every day that's super simple that for me to execute Now I go into every day almost as a blank slate as I can set what I want to work on, what I want to develop on, what I want to manage and where I want to improve in the company. And that's where it's gotten almost kind of scary because the foundation's been built, the business is running like a well oiled machine, like it should. I'm almost not needed now. I need to focus on my time of how we go into other Markets, how we get bigger, how we improve, how we better serve our clients.
That's been a big thing, a big learning experience for me this year. It's been scary. It's been really scary. That's the easiest way. That's the best word I can use for it. It's been scary.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I sense a theme here. You've mentioned that a few times. And the thing that stands out to me here is you said, well, hey, I almost feel like I'm not needed. But what's really happening is you eliminated your need to be elbow deep in the functional operations of the company so that you could focus on that higher value stuff. And it was just yesterday I was having a conversation with someone who basically does operations. Her name is Alexis. She has a company called Process to Profit. And, and with, with Process to Profit, it's that same kind of conversation.
The reason that we're trying to go and sell more and market for more business is because that's all that anybody really like you join a mastermind or you're in these networking groups. That's all they're really talking about. Because operations, it's not a sexy topic.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: But operations, if you get that right, it allows you to bring in more sales and more marketing and walk in with a blank slate to be able to innovate instead of keep turning the crank. And it sounds like that investment for you took a little while, but once those, once those plants started to sprout, they, they've sprouted exponentially for you.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's been, really has been. I mean, you know, if, if I was to look back at the, the, the freedom it's developed by building that foundation.
If somebody told me back then, you know, I didn't know it was going to cost a quarter of a million dollars. All I knew is that we needed to develop it. That was it.
I knew it needed to happen and it didn't. And I knew in order for me to get to where I wanted to be five years, 10 years down the road, I needed to make that investment.
And luckily, you know, it's one of those things that you can, it didn't need to be $250,000. Right. I could have, right up front, I could have gone at it and just nibbled away at it incrementally and, you know, spread that over time. And that's one thing I want, want other people that maybe are like, looking, I'm, I'm using big numbers and they're going, holy crap, there's no way I can do that. You know, when we started delivering house plans and house projects, we started with a spreadsheet and then we went into a very simple website. You know, once we exceeded about 150, 200 houses in a year, we went to a very simple website, project management.
And then it wasn't until I knew we could be doing, instead of a couple hundred houses a year, we could be doing a couple hundred houses a week. I mean, our goal right now in the next three years is to be about a thousand houses a month.
And, you know, that's.
I knew we needed to develop something today that could service that five years from now because I didn't want to go back through and have our team when we're trying to actually be doing a thousand houses a month for us to be developing a new PM program to then be doing that. So, you know, it, it was that that foundation investment was important, but it was also something like I said, I could have nibbled off on it like, okay, we want to add this feature now. We want to add this feature now. We're going to revise this. And that's kind of what we've done over time. But we took a big bite. And I'm glad we did because really, right after we did it, we ended up signing a client that does just. That client alone does a thousand houses a year.
And then, you know, so that was. If I hadn't taken off that bite, you know, taken off a bigger bite than I could and figured out a way to chew it, I wouldn't have been able to take on that bigger client. And, you know, and now that bigger client has then brought us and introduced us to other clients that have, you know, the same difficulty with smaller firms being able to service them efficiently. So, you know, it's been, It's. It was worth every penny. And honestly, looking back, if somebody told me it was going to cost $1 million, I would have done it. Because the time that is a freed up for me, the peace of mind it gives, and the ability for me to just know from the time a project comes in till delivery, every single box is checked and everything is QC throughout the process. Yeah. And our clients are taken care of expediently. And that's a whole, you know, that was, my whole goal was to service home builders. You know, we're, we're in a service industry. You're. You're a servant. You're a servant to your clients. And that's exactly what we built is a process for us to be expediently servant to our clients.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Love that. So where can we go to learn more about your business and who's a good fit for connecting with you?
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so we're, we're basically a full vertically integrated service for home builders and then we've added a company called Plyris Forensics which has a service to home builders division to it. But then we also are servicing for construction defect and insurance insurance work as well. So Plures is our primary company. Our parent company Pluris Co is our website there. Polaris Co and then Pluris Plans is is our service where we market house plans for other home designers. We also have a. And we basically market those to the public and we also use those with our builders and developing their builder libraries. We have a house plan library about 4,000 house plans and we're the only company that sells house plans. Permit ready for your site and that's pluresplans.com and then pliers Forensics is going to be launching here in the next week or two and that will be clearsforensics.com Excellent.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Well, hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thanks so much to Royal Mortier for coming on and sharing a little bit of wisdom about thriving in an ultra competitive industry and the importance of building a strong foundation and how everything else will come afterwards. You can learn more about the Pluris suite of businesses by going to Pluris Co. And if you are an agency coach, professional service provider or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you on a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to stack your calendar with qualified, motivated prospects who want what you have, download our free
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