Matthew Nix with Nix Companies. Thanks for joining today on the Irregardless podcast. So Nix Companies, as we were just discussing, you guys are in Poseyville, Illinois. Tell me a little bit about Nix Companies. Sorry, Indiana. Yeah, we're barely in Indiana, but we're happy to be on the right side of the river that's a little more business-friendly, tax-friendly state. I don't think I'll offend too many people in the audience by saying that. As a matter of fact, anyways. Well, I don't think you are, but tell me about Nick's Companies. Yeah, so Nick's Companies is a family holding company that I formed back in 2017. Our legacy business, which we go by Nick's Industrial now, it was a blacksmith shop. My great-great-grandfather started it in the late 1800s, evolved into a mom-and-pop welding shop. We were referred to as Nick's Welding. And then when I joined the business, fifth generation, somewhere along the lines, I rebranded the Knicks Metals. That sort of better encompassed what we do. And then we subsequently rebranded the Knicks Industrial. It's sort of just got a little more broad, you know, as we've gone. But the core business is really still the same. I tell people we make and repair things that are made out of metal. And that's what my great-great-grandfather did in the late 1800s. And it's what we still do today. We deploy. different technology to do that and the customer base that we serve is a little bit different although agriculture which was our predominant customer base back in the day is still part of our business today and in fact we do more for the ag industry than we ever have but it makes up a much smaller piece of the business today primarily we're a heavy industrial commercial and heavy industrial business today well i was reading an article that you were interviewed and i don't remember uh exactly who is interviewing you but you had probably a quote or better quotes i've heard in a while which is about how you guys defy the odds for generations where if uh if you're not growing you're dying right you've managed concurrently to both not grow and not die yeah well they tell me about that well they did that for four generations so i hope that the irony doesn't totally come back to bite me which is that we've grown the shit out of it in my generation so hopefully we're not the ones to kill it too but for four generations yeah it stayed mom and pop never never had a a single employee on the payroll outside the family it was uh the brothers owned it in gen one and then the oldest brother bought the older brothers out which is kind of interesting even though i'm gen five there's actually been an extra transition in there then my great-grandfather took over And then my grandfather took over. He was the only boy in the family. And then my dad took over for my grandfather. And it was when I joined the business, it was my dad, my grandpa, and my aunt. And not only did my aunt do the books in the office, she also ran a lathe in a milling machine. And everybody just pitched in and did what they had to do. And so I grew up in that business. yeah so i like to say they they were defying the odds you know they didn't grow and they didn't die and and they they were quite prosperous too i mean it was a uh you know very typical kind of working class mom and pop shop you know i mean uh i grew up with with that's how my dad provided for our family and you know we had a great middle class lifestyle and and he worked his butt off to do that and my brother and i took over the business and and we've grown it exponentially since then and Hopefully we can set the next generation up to be successful as well. Would you say there's a bit of a rebirthing? Yeah, it was. They were not entrepreneurial, and they didn't have aspirations to grow. A lot of people have asked me for advice, younger folks or folks starting in business or trying to grow their business, and I say, look, there's nothing wrong with staying small and making really good money. If you're going to grow, you better put both feet in. hip toe if you're gonna if you really i'm talking about really intentional growth i don't mean just the business is going to sort of naturally grow i think if you just do good work and you know take care of customers but i'm talking about intentional growth you know you you got to decide if that's what you want and there's nothing wrong with staying small and work you know just sort of being your own boss but uh yeah we we just i realized somewhere along the way that After a lot of soul searching, this is sort of the way God made me, and I can't help it. I'm entrepreneurial. I'm restless. I'm always just trying to challenge the status quo. Embrace it. Yeah. Yeah. It took me a while, though, to embrace that. My dad asked me one time, when's enough enough? I really thought about that. I don't know. I thought, as long as I'm healthy and I feel good and my family's healthy. got a good team around me like it almost feels wrong to not you know pursue it perhaps that's not how you think about it at all by the way which is one's enough enough it's like that's not perhaps what this is even about right right that's this is this is a personality type and what you described and is it resonated to a to a degree which is you know there's a restlessness and just a desire to to be entrepreneurial or industrious and it's not really thought about in a measure of is have i achieved what i set out to do it's about doing yeah that's right yep are we are we better than we were last year and and you know it's a it's a tremendous opportunity i think too and that really motivates me the opportunity to to do good and to make an impact in people's lives in our community and you know in our industry if i'm going to be really audacious uh so yeah we just keep going an interesting thing happened with your generation which is and i correct me when i when i'm just completely wrong but uh you were a mom and pop and it sounds like you you took some license as you're coming of age in your 20s to put numbers on the side of trucks and other things but you know that's one thing to have the kind of the understanding to okay let's do some marketing another thing to be like okay let's form a holding company that acquires other companies and yeah and uh be not quite a family office but not quite private equity and that that brings a level of sophistication into the arena that sounds like uh i mean the sophistication probably the capability was there but it was you guys were not thinking in that direction and what what sort of kicked off your thinking it's those are things that you you know you just don't stumble into that's right is there advising that was going on how did you come into this kind of this growth path yeah great question well you know i think to some extent i did stumble into it but i think that i did so by being really open-minded and really you know just sort of yeah have being open about what opportunities are out there so we had acquired one business uh much like a lot of people do in a very opportunistic way so the business was in our town it was closely adjacent to what we did and i thought it was a good real estate play so we bought the business so I had one acquisition under my belt. It was small. There was five team members that came over with us and worked through a lot of challenges in that process. It didn't all go like we expected and wanted it to. But I think working through those challenges and coming out the other side and making it a success gave me even more confidence that we can do this. And then around the same time, I'm in a business owner peer group. It's a grassroots, cross-functional group of people. None of us are in the same industry. and been doing that for 11 years now it's been really impactful for my career but also just developed lifelong friendships deep meaningful friendships in the process but one of the gentlemen in my group runs a real estate and auction company and he he was saying this years ago it's it's common language now but this is you know a decade or so ago he said Our world is about to see the largest exchange of wealth that we've ever seen as the baby boomers go into retirement. All of these businesses and all this wealth, in his case, farmland specifically, he's in the auction business, but other assets too. They all have to move hands from one generation to the next. Largest exchange of wealth in the history of our country. And I started thinking about that and I thought, wow, this guy's sitting right in front of this wave. What a great spot to be in. How might I position myself sort of in a similar position? And similar to what you were saying earlier, my motivation's never really been financially driven. I just saw this as a smart thing to do. If there's going to be this wave and this transfer, positioning oneself in front of that seems like a good place to be, a lot more opportunity. And so I'd done one acquisition, and I started thinking, well, what if we bought other businesses like ours? And lo and behold, there's a tremendous amount of businesses out there, many of which are owner operator, often don't have succession plans. Or if they do, you know, maybe the plans didn't work out. And so we acquired our first fab shop. It was a structural fabrication business, very closely, you know, related to what we did. And from then we learned a little bit more and we acquired a heavy machine shop and we learned a little bit more and we acquired another one. And we've come to realize that. We do have something unique and that is like what we do at these businesses is really not unique at all in the sense that we do the same thing every other shop does in the country. You know, we make and repair parts out of metal. We all generally buy the same equipment. You know, we're all trying to do the same thing. We're trying to implement lean and be efficient and so on and so forth. What I figured out that was unique was that we could deploy some economies of scale. and some shared service and some synergies by creating this small home office. And, you know, most of these shops aren't large enough to have a full-time CFO or full-time HR or a full-time safety manager or, you know, add to the list. You get the point. And we can deploy that from a home office and share these services across all these businesses, and it brings our overhead structure down. But really, we're able to bring world-class, I think. administrative support sophistication to these businesses and really let them do what they do well and we sort of supplement and uh you know we've had our share of challenges but by and large it's worked yeah i think uh like i was kind of laughing internally yeah being from indiana and your your quarterback mendoza talking about synergies a lot recently uh after she caught those interviews and they're like They asked him, I said, they said, what is, you keep saying that word. He's like, I don't even know what it means. It just sounds right for, because it sounds right for a team. I was like, that made him instantly likable when he was like, I don't know what it means. But, okay, so you guys are a choir adjacent and be able to, you know, roll up or share costs and resources across, I guess, the different silos. that you guys have internally so widening the clock back i thought you you guys done a great job of chronicling the family stories fifth generation uh you had that uh newspaper clipping that was on your website of carl at eight years old working working at the blacksmith shop so what do you guys do you know what you guys were actually making back in the 1800s i mean we talking like uh shoes for horses kind of thing or absolutely yeah so i mean i have firsthand record from my grandfather uh who was born in uh let's see the late 20s i think uh anyways he you know we firsthand accounts from him so he certainly still remembers the blacksmith shop quite vividly uh he's since passed away but we very blessed to be able to get him on camera and share some things but and we still have a lot of the old equipment too we've got a little metalworking museum in our foyer at our main office but yeah they were shoeing horses uh he talked about making little hooks for fences and things for agriculture and you know yeah it was just a lot of little little metal parts that that the farmers and ranchers needed and that of course evolved and you know even when i was growing up we we would weld up a lot of plow points build them up they get wore down from going through the field and that's how i learned to weld because you couldn't really screw it up you just run pass after pass after pass and then lay some hard surfacing on it and you know we built fuel tanks for farmers you know welded up dump trucks and farm equipment and mangled up corn planters where they hit a telephone pole or something i mean you name it we did were you guys farming at all or you were sort of the kind of like the guys selling it more like selling the shovels out of the gold mine you know well it wasn't quite it wasn't quite that good but no we didn't farm uh we do have a little bit of farm ground that we rent out but no never we've never farmed we're too busy working on the farm equipment uh and so you know fifth generation that's not not a common tale honestly it's usually third generation if the company's been around for three generations usually it's it's facing maybe a disposition by gen three yeah it seems to be kind of the common tale but as you were growing up uh were you thinking that you were going to be at nix or did you have other plans yeah i really did uh i one thing i considered was an architect it's the only other thing i remember like legitimately considering which i think is interesting because now like the things i'm drawn to and and i could i kind of consider myself architect in a sense of you know architecting the vision and the organizational structure of the business the only other thing i considered i went to vincent's university for a year as a popular two-year school around here has a really great welding program and a lot of folks would leave there and go to purdue and get their four-year and i i uh considered metallurgical engineering i thought that seemed interesting then i just decided i didn't want to go to school anymore and i was ready to get back and get to work so i went for one year for welding and then went went right back to work but uh yeah other than that i pretty much felt like the the family business was where i was going to end up and that that differs from my brother's path he went got a four-year degree really was not interested in the business at all he'll he shares he even had some disdain for it at times but he came full circle and i'm glad he did he's a tremendous partner and he and i make a good team and my wife's involved as well she she quit her job she went to iu for four years and quit her job and and has worked on the administrative side of our business and really been instrumental in helping us grow as well and circling back to something you commented on earlier, which is it sounds like mentorship is in kind of your world. You said you're talking to people who are starting out or maybe just had an ambition to go do something. Your journey's probably informed. You're thinking quite a bit there. And what is maybe the top three things you would say to a young buck who's thinking about going out and starting their own business or trying to chase down the dream? What are the three things that you would advise them? That's a good question. That's a tough one. But before I answer that, let me just say that I have had so many tremendous mentors along the way, so many people that have poured into me, and I think largely that's because I've sought it out. So maybe that might be the first thing I would say is, like, you know, be curious and don't be afraid to seek out, you know, input or advice from others. a lunch one time. There's only one family business in the Evansville area. That's the largest, you know, kind of metro to us here. There's only one family business in town that's a billion dollar a year business. And so, you know, by most measures, they're maybe the most successful family business. They've also been around five generations. And I asked the CEO to go to lunch with me. We were a tiny blip on the radar back then. And he took me up on it. And I asked him at the lunch, I said, you know, why did you agree to do this you don't really know me from adam and he said well it's pretty simple matthew he said you asked you know and it was like what what i think was implied there is not that many people ask him to go to lunch and so there was a huge lesson in that for me and and i've since had a lot of very uh successful folks you know that i've been able to engage with in that way we formed an advisory board um that's been instrumental as well so again first thing would probably be curious don't be afraid to to reach out and ask for input. The next thing I would say is you've got to really have a clear vision of where you want to go. If you're not crystal clear about where you want to go, then others can't be clear about that. And if you're not clear about it, you're not going to believe in it and others aren't going to believe in it. So you've got to have a really clear vision. My dad used to always say when we were fixing broken farm equipment, he would say, if you can't see the end of the project before you start, you're You can fill in the blank. He talked like a typical rough guy in a welding shop. But, you know, that really stuck with me. And it's relevant if you're fixing something that's broken and it's relevant if you're building a business. You've got to be able to see the future and what are the stepping stones to get there. And then the third thing that sounds really cliche, but I'm going to tell you nothing maybe matters more, is you've got to surround yourself with the right people. You know, I've been very fortunate to be able to do that. And I think that compelling vision, well, I don't think I know that compelling vision is instrumental in that. The more clear and compelling your vision is, the higher likelihood you're going to be able to bring really great people in around you to support that vision. So I guess off the cuff, those are three things I would say. I would echo every one of those. I think assembling just. The mentorship is paramount. And it's when you're younger and you're talking to these guys, I would add to it, just have a measure of humility because you are not going to be able to see what they see. I mean, they've seen so much because they've been in business 20 years longer and they say things. And when you're younger, you're just like, you're thinking like, it's amazing how much these guys don't know. then like six months later exactly what they just like exactly what they told you was going to happen happens yeah you're like holy i remember a specific example of that we were growing like a rocket ship and one of them said how's your cash flow and i thought that cash flow what the hell is he talking about i mean it's fine i guess we're growing strong everything yeah strong everything's fine and uh I'll be damned if it wasn't, yeah, like you said, I don't know, a year or so later, it was like we had a cash flow crunch. And we had been having record year after record year. But he saw what was coming that I didn't see. You know, the CapEx keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the accounts receivable keeps getting bigger and bigger. And all of a sudden, a big customer doesn't pay on time. perfect storm sort of happens, had a massive tax bill that we had to pay because we had a record year. And it was like, oh, yeah. And all of a sudden you have a cash crunch. And it was like, yeah, I remember him just playing his day saying, how's your cash flow? You know what? Keep an eye on that. You know, cash is king. And so that that's always stuck with me. Oh, it's so true. I mean, just having that mentorship. And I think the humility is is. I think always that every step of a journey is the right thing. But I mean, not not foolishly humble, meaning like maintain a good level of confidence once a decision is made. A simple way of expressing humility in those settings is taking notes. You know, I mean, it's like you said, not not false humility, just just this acknowledgement that like, hey, you know, a lot and I asked you for a reason. I'm here to listen and taking notes. I think the two. most important things that make mentors want to continue to engage with you this has just been my own observation is taking notes and so that they know you're really listening in your care maybe even share like here were my takeaways hey thanks for your time here were my key takeaways but then share having them share in your success along the way I think that really makes them feel like they were a part of the journey and they want to continue to engage with you. So it might be a year later, we have a big milestone and you reach out and say, hey, just want to share with you. You know, we talked a year ago. I did a couple of things and here's a great outcome that's come out of that. And and I think that, you know, I've had the CEO of a seven billion dollar company. He took it. public uh just massively successful ceo he's came back and spoke to our company at our annual meeting three times now i've the collective amount i paid him is three cups of coffee he's done that because he's been a part of the journey now you know and he keeps coming back uh so anyways for what it's worth i think that's hugely important if you want to continue to engage with mentors and so what do you see is uh You know, you've probably talked about this many times, but I think it's becoming more and more, it's becoming less of a toy, which is AI. And I think that, you know, you have a family of companies and a lot going out and you're out in the market, presumably, you know, maybe actively or sort of passively looking for acquisition targets or what's next best steps for you guys. How are you thinking about AI? We're deploying it a lot. We're thinking about it a lot. I'll admit, I have not been really deploying it in search of acquisitions. That's largely probably just because we haven't been really actively pursuing deals at the moment. We're still digesting a couple right now. And we're taking inbound opportunities, but I'm not out there driving. But I'll say this about AI. This is on my mind because I had a... a one-on-one debrief shortly before our call here today and something i've started asking uh trying to ask if i can remember to be disciplined about this in all my debriefs And one of the things I'm ending the call with is tell me about a few ways that you've used AI in the last couple of weeks. Two reasons I'm asking that question. One, I'm trying to send the signal that this is important and we're trying to remind everybody. But also, I'm almost always learning something that somebody on my team is doing that I haven't thought about yet or I can share with other people on our team. encourage people to leverage this technology. And our VP of administration has set himself a weekly reminder where he's sending out an email, communicating to our team. He's either sharing best practices from within the company or outside the company or an article. We're just trying to encourage right now and then sort of shine the light on when someone has used it to really drive some efficiencies or think outside the box. I mean, we're probably using it a lot of the same ways most people are. I don't know that we need to get into all the details, but I think, you know, maybe I'll just share a light bulb moment. This happened last week, and when I realized I'm not even scratching the surface of what I could be doing, my 11-year-old came home from school. He had about an hour and a half before he was going to go to wrestling practice, and he was over playing around on his computer, and I thought maybe he was doing homework, and I walked by. I said, what are you doing? He said, oh, I'm making my own video game. I said, what do you mean you're making your own video game? He said, yeah, I'm using AI and telling him what I want. It's writing the code and it's going back and forth. And he got far enough. He left for practice and he came back from practice. And then before bedtime, he was playing the damn video game that existed in his imagination four hours earlier. And that was like head explosion for me. I was like, okay, we've got to be doing so much. so much more uh for this so well it's a bit of a paradox right which is i was just reading an article i think it was in well i think it might have been a harvard business review or something like that that was talking about uh the paradox of employers asking employees to use ai right which is on the one hand the employee says yes i should use that because that will make me more efficient which will make me have more value to this business and we when we all do better we all do better the other side of that being of course if we get too good at this and i start writing in pro and making autonomous programs for my functions here maybe i am not going to be needed as much as i was before And it's explored the paradox of it, which is as companies push out AI and do things, it gives people pause. I'm like, I don't know if I really want to use this. That has never occurred to me until you just said that. And I think, well, first of all, it's perfectly rational why people would think that. I think there's a couple of reasons why that has never occurred to me. And I feel... quite confident in saying that that doesn't go through my team members' minds. There's two reasons. We have such a culture of growth and innovation, and I think it's been so instilled in them before AI and during AI that they already had this predisposition that if we get faster, we're just going to do more. Perhaps we'll slow down the rate that we add people. But the idea of minimizing people, that doesn't even go through their mind, nor does it go through mine. The second one is the industry we're in. So I would say if you're in customer service in an insurance company, yeah, you might need to be a little worried about AI automating that. But if you're doing highly engineered products like we are or anything in our world, I think it's going to make us much more efficient. But automating what we do without still a lot of human intervention feels like, That's a long way away. And yeah, we don't even know what conceptually what that even looks like. So anyways. I hear you. And I think that that is so that article did not explore the concept of given a certain team composition. There is sort of this, well, if I do, if I'm successful with AI, then I'm out of here. They're not going to need me anymore. Whereas if you got the right team, it's like, no, I'm glad you don't have to do that stuff anymore. Let's go get this stuff now. Yep. yep how can we add how can we add more value yeah if we can cover more ground yeah that that's a good thing uh so anyway tell me more about the like so you have the the the companies that you're making you have what which one is sort of is it just nick's industries or industrial that is the direct direct lineage of the original nicks and what do you guys what do you guys do i want to hear a little bit about that Sure. Yes. Yes. Nick's industrial is the direct lineage from the blacksmith shop. And we've done multiple acquisitions under that. That's it. That's a true, you know, sort of roll up strategy. You know, nothing, nothing new there. They keep their operational presence. We slowly rebrand them over to Nick's Industrial. We centralize a lot of the back office, but the estimating stays localized. And we're really big on decentralization. So we want to have as much autonomy of those locations as possible. So within that, we have a series of businesses that all sort of specialize. So the legacy. business which is the direct lineages one location underneath that and it's a heavy equipment repair business so we we fix semi-trailers dump trucks garbage trucks farm equipment bulldozers excavators you get the idea heavy industrial equipment and a lot of stuff out of plants too power plants and so on and so forth big heavy dirty stuff made out of metal we fix it weld it machine it cut it apart put it back together that kind of thing so that's the the uh legacy business we've got a field coatings business we go out in the field and sandblast and paint out in the field a lot of crossover with the customer base there oftentimes the metal guys and paint guys will be working you know on the same same project we have a custom fabrication shop a pretty traditional custom shop i would say you know we're building a lot of platforms catwalks guarding rails it's plant work we have an engineering team we go into the go in alongside the customer design a solution they're saying hey i need to get up there and work on that piece of equipment help me do it efficiently safely so on so forth so that's that business we have a paint and powder coat shop that shop supports a lot of our other shops we acquired a structural shop that's traditional structural fab so new building construction it's beams and columns all day long we have you know cnc beam lines You unload a raw beam on one end of the building and you send a fabricated beam out the other end. So that's all that business does. We've got a machine shop, a traditional machine shop. I'd say about half repair work and about half make new. And then most recently we acquired a sheet metal shop, pretty traditional sheet metal. It's laser cutting, CNC forming, some robotic welding, a lot of manual welding still. So we're a contract manufacturer where we might make $1,000 of this, $2,000 of that kind of thing. So you can see the similarities in all the businesses. They're all adjacent, but they all sort of specialize operationally in what we do. And so back to the synergy thing, I mean, the practical aspects of that are buying power. They all buy metal for the most part. So we have that. And then the other big one would just be the shared services in the back office. So that's what the business looks like. And those locations are spread across. you know a few hour radius so it's all still pretty pretty regionalized and then you also have a marketing business or a you know a content business in there as well we have a few other businesses outside the core legacy that are all you know part of the family holding company so yeah the marketing business the way we got into that was our head of marketing who's very talented approached me and said hey I've always wanted to start my own business I'm thinking about starting my own business. Would you be interested in supporting me and helping me do that? I always joke and say it wasn't real selfless of me to help him, but I was going to lose him or help him, so I might as well help him. He's appreciative. I think it's been a great partnership. We've certainly brought a lot of clients to him, and we're still his biggest client. Although he's growing so well, so fast that I've got to kind of try to keep my spot in line with him but he's done he's got a team of three now and uh he does all our video content and you know he does uh you know other traditional marketing as well but uh yeah so that's one of them we also bought a heavy truck body shop so that's outside the legacy business but again the similarities is this blue collar service work so the economics are similar the common denominator is can you attract great blue collar talent you know skilled uh trades talent that's that's kind of the common denominator in the businesses we have so we fix rec semis city buses amazon vans ups so on and so forth and then we also bought a truck equipment upfitter and and we're actually merging those two businesses together under a new brand called fleet service partners so that'll be a sister to nick's industrial And we hope to continue to do acquisitions under that platform as well. So that would be like we build, you know, big, heavy work trucks, you know, think like lube trucks, city trucks for salt spreaders and snow plows and so forth, things of that nature. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you guys have got your hands full with all of this. And looking ahead. um is is kind of without getting into too much of what is your business but is just to continue on the same trajectory basically of like building out the right the right groupings of businesses and kind of just proceed yeah i say just rinse and repeat you know it's just we just need to keep doing what we're doing do it well not everything we do works perfectly so you know we just learn as we go and and if we make a mistake let's let's get it corrected but but by and large you know from a macro standpoint it's working so let's just let's keep keep doing what we're doing and rinse and repeat uh well good well i want to keep us to right about where we are now about 45 minutes or so but wanted to say uh you know thank you for coming on today i've enjoyed learning about your business and about what you guys are doing i love the five generations you just don't hear that very often and you guys have done such a good job of like curating chronicling that uh that that you know Love hearing the stories. Yeah. Thank you for that. Speaking of chronicling, I'll shamelessly plug my books here. Yeah. We, a really talented writer named Angie Klink. She's a professional historian, professional writer. She wrote this book. And I think the subtitle kind of sums it up. It says how five generations of small town values collided with big ambitions to spark one of America's fastest growing company. And so if you're listening, forging ahead. Yeah. Okay. That's the title. But it's on Amazon or any of the major bookstores. When was that released? When did you guys get that done? Yeah, November of 24. Yeah, so just a little over a year ago, the book came out. And it tells the story of the early aspects of the story, but then also the recent part of our journey with the mergers and acquisitions and so forth. that's fabulous well people need to bring up uh go go get forging ahead yeah thank you it'd take a read on it but uh i want to say thank you again it's been fun chatting with you and uh hope to talk to you again soon thank you thank you very much for having me on all right have a good one