Podcast Episode 97

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Stay Curious– Life Lessons from One Contractor to Another

Stay Curious– Life Lessons from One Contractor to Another

Episode 97 | 16 min

With Guests:

Bob Lepper, Retired Excavation Expert
Jacob Handsaker, Owner of Hands-On Tiling & Excavating LLC

Jamie sits down for a conversation with Jacob Handsaker and Bob Lepper on this episode of the Water Table Podcast. Learn how a used excavator launched drainage contractor Jacob’s career, and how Bob has been integral in passing knowledge to the next generation– in excavating, show business and beyond. It’s a story about constant curiosity you won’t want to miss.

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You’ve got to have passion. I've always looked at this as a long game... I’m going to be in dirt the rest of my life.

— Bob Lepper

Guest Bios

Bob Lepper

Bob ran Bob Lepper Excavating in Hardin County, Iowa for more than 30 years before moving to Branson, MO to help manage his family’s singing career. He returned to the excavating business to help the Handsaker family launch Hands-On Tiling & Excavating until he retired in 2015.

Jacob Handsaker

Jacob is a drainage contractor, farmer and pork producer and owns and operates Hands-On Excavating & Tiling LLC with his brothers in Story and Hardin Counties in Iowa. He is a 5th generation farmer and graduated from Iowa State with a degree in Agricultural Studies. His company has installed more saturated buffers and bioreactors than anyone else in the world.

Jamie Duininck (00:00):
Welcome to The Water Table Podcast. Today I am at Iowa State University and I have Jacob Handsaker from Hands On Excavating and Bob Lepper. Bob started way back when with Bob Lepper Excavating, and Bob happened to be the guy that got Jacob into the business and excited to just have a conversation, kind of how this all began. Welcome guys.

Bob Lepper (00:29):
Thanks, Jamie.

Jacob Handsaker (00:30):
Thank you.

Jamie Duininck (00:30):
Jacob, you kind of started working with Bob in high school, right and kind of tell us a little bit about that?

Jacob Handsaker (00:36):
Yeah. I got to skip a lot of days of school to go work with Bob, so dad was fine with it. Mom, maybe not so much, but no, Bob was just the local excavating contractor and my dad had worked with him hauling asphalt and stuff when times were a little slower on the farm growing up, and then the start of the hog building era, I’d go run Dozer for him, and we built some grain bins down in Nevada, did some packing down there. It’s kind of funny that the grain bins that we built down there over the last few years, we’ve added storage to that same site and built additional storage for those guys on the dirt work side of things. So long-term, good clients to work with and thankful that Bob was helping, Bob was able to help us get started.

Jamie Duininck (01:36):
Sure. Sure. Tell us a little bit about your history before Jacob, so to speak, BC?

Bob Lepper (01:46):
Graduated high school in 1978 from Radcliffe, and my brother had just completed a building trades course at DMACC, and so I went to work for him. Carpentry. Eventually we got to where we were building houses and things, but we were doing the whole concept of the basements and everything, and I started, bought my first machine in 1981, and had known, obviously growing up on a farm, you run every kind of machine that’s on the farm, and we didn’t have any excavating machinery but tractors, loaders, blades, so on.

(02:31):
We did have an old little three-point mounted backhoe, could fix a tile, dig out a rock, that kind of thing, but then when I started being around the construction industry more, my brother would hire guys to dig the basements and do the finished grading, and I got to watching that and said, “I think I can do that.”

(02:50):
And so I just borrowed a little money in 1981 and bought an old crawler loader, a dump truck with a tag trailer, and I was in business. So I ended up selling out that company in 2000. We moved to Missouri for a while. I went into real estate down in Branson, Missouri. Jim, Jacob’s dad called me in ’08, and he said, “Well, I was just wondering you had a certain kind of excavator when you quit. I was wondering if they were good machines,” and I said, “Yeah, yeah, it was a good machine.” He said, “Well, there’s one coming up on an auction.” And so he said, “Well, I think we’re going to bid on it, and if we get that bought, would you be available to come up and show the boys how to run it?” I said, “Yeah,” because real estate had slowed down, ’08 and ’09 were bad times real estate. So I had time on my hands, and so they got it bought and I believe it was in the fall of the year, if I remember right.

(03:50):
And so I went up there and Jim had lined up something, a demolition of corn crib or.

Jacob Handsaker (03:56):
It was a corn crib at our house.

Bob Lepper (03:57):
At your place? Okay. Started there, and then it was wintertime, and in the next spring, Jim wanted to continue and started looking for jobs to do around the area, just all the same stuff I used to do, just general ag excavating stuff, and he called it Radcliffe Excavating, remember that? Yeah, that was the name of it. And then pretty soon there was dozer and backhoes, scrapers, and I was there then full time for probably six years?

Jacob Handsaker (03:57):
Six, seven years.

Bob Lepper (04:37):
Six or seven years. And then came the tiling. I was talking with him one day and I said, “You know, you’ve got everything here except a plow, and I think you can make good money in farm drainage. You got the people, you’ve got all this other equipment.” So they picked up that first trailing wheel plow, put it behind a quad track, and we pulled a lot of tile.

Jamie Duininck (05:03):
Cool. And then did you move back up to Iowa then during that time frame or were you kind of commuting?

Bob Lepper (05:09):
No, I was bouncing back and forth. Our family farm is still just five miles away from their family farm, and there was two houses there, my grandparents’ old house, and so I would stay in that. I’d come up for a couple of weeks, stay in that, go home for a week or sometimes less to Branson and just did that for quite a few years.

Jamie Duininck (05:30):
Sure. Tell me a little bit about you, Bob, before, from that 1981 to 2000, what kind of opportunities were you seeing and how did your business grow, just curious as a lot of our listeners, our business owners?

Bob Lepper (05:46):
There wasn’t that much internet waste, if any, I don’t know, back then. And if there was, I wouldn’t have known how to do it to advertise. So some newspaper ads and things and just basically word of mouth, it can be your best friend or your worst friend, just depends on how it worked out. But I had a good following of customers in the Hardin County area, was digging all my… My brother went on then to move down to Ames, and he began building big homes, but he had a good career, and so I did all his excavating work and like I say, all the farm stuff, and I wasn’t actually tiling per se in those years, but tile repairs.

(06:31):
Sometimes you have to back backhoe in a new short spur or this or that and that kind of thing. And I didn’t have the help to actually run a tiling company. Most of the time I was working alone and like Jacob part-time and a couple other guys. And so just did all that kind of stuff. A lot of building pads and bin pads, like he talked about, had an opportunity to go out to Idaho and put in some Prince Gold Dual Wall.

Jamie Duininck (07:01):
Really?

Bob Lepper (07:02):
Yeah. There’s a family there at Hubbard, not far from my home there, and their one son went out to Idaho and got into the sawmill business, and he actually came to my place one day and he was older than me, and I never had met him, but he introduced himself and he said, “We got a terrible mess out there when these log trucks come in, they’re so heavy, they’re sinking in our yards, especially the spring of the year.” And he said, “Then we’ve got these big forklifts and they’re leaving huge tracks.”

(07:38):
And he said, “I just wonder if there’s anything, what could we do to dry up this ground?” And so I think I got some pictures from them and this and that, and finally decided that it would probably be a good opportunity to try and tile it. And I was actually talking with a competitor of mine about this, and we had this scheme worked up where we were going to put his tiling machine on a train and rail it out to Idaho. We flew out there to actually get on the site, and we really realized right away, you’re not going to plow anything because all the years of trunk and big branches into that mud with those machines and I’ve got a picture somewhere of me standing in one of those tracks up to my waist.

(08:25):
These were huge monsters of four wheel drive, rubber tire forklifts that would pull into those log trucks and pick the whole thing up and back away and go. And now we’re not going to get anywhere with a tile plow. So we then got a truckload of six inch Dual Wall tile, and they had a guy come with an excavator.

(08:48):
At that point, I was pretty much a supervisor for that and tiled that thing out, and it was very successful, bedded the tile with one inch clean. And then across the road they owned land. There was a big rock hill, and they got a guy in there to dynamite that, and we had shot rock to fill the rest of the ditch all the way up to the top. And the next year he stopped by again. I thought, “Oh, no.” And he said, “That lot was as dry as it’s ever been in the years that I’ve owned that.”

Jamie Duininck (09:21):
That’s pretty neat. Where was that in Idaho?

Bob Lepper (09:24):
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Jamie Duininck (09:24):
Okay. Way up north.

Bob Lepper (09:26):
And I think he went on then, that owner of that, I think he assisted in other yards with this system of a header line and then six inch. That was a good experience.

Jamie Duininck (09:39):
Yeah. So this is your chance here on Live Deal here, was Jacob your best employee-

Bob Lepper (09:46):
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, on time. Yeah. Yeah. I could tell him about something and he’d-

Jamie Duininck (09:53):
He’d do it?

Bob Lepper (09:54):
Yeah, he’d soak it up like a sponge and yeah.

Jamie Duininck (09:58):
No one on The Water Table surprised about that, but I wanted to see if we could get something interesting.

Bob Lepper (10:03):
I tried to get him to work full time, or at least we kicked it around, but he wanted to go to college.

Jamie Duininck (10:12):
And then you kind talked a little bit, I think Jacob mentioned it in his kind of start here, but a little bit about the hog boom. And did you get involved in that when you-

Bob Lepper (10:24):
Yeah, did that.

Jamie Duininck (10:26):
Were you doing site work or what were you doing?

Bob Lepper (10:28):
Digging the pits. Digging the hole for the concrete pits. Yeah. Did a lot of hog stuff. Also did a lot of those, years ’80s was when the Superfund was out there for cleaning up the underground storage tank contamination. So I got certified in that and did a lot of that all over the state of Iowa.

Jamie Duininck (10:50):
Sure, sure. It wasn’t that boom in the hog industry, really the epicenter of that kind of where you guys are located there, the beginning of it.?

Bob Lepper (10:59):
Oh yeah.

Jamie Duininck (11:00):
Iowa Select is right in that area, right? Yeah.

Jacob Handsaker (11:04):
The one I can remember on one of the projects was running dozer, pushing away when Bob would throw it out with the excavator, you can stand on top of that hill and look around and see several hundred hog buildings. So we were right in the center of it all.

Jamie Duininck (11:21):
So just kind of interesting, more than part of the story probably, but it’s part of your story, but the way I understand it, Bob, is you did some family things. Why don’t you tell us about that, what your family was up to after you left Iowa?

Bob Lepper (11:37):
Okay. Well-

Jamie Duininck (11:38):
I’m just curious and I read about it and I thought, “That’s neat.

Bob Lepper (11:41):
Before we moved to Branson in 2000, several years before that, my wife and the two kids got started singing. It was just a fun thing to do, family thing, and it got to be more and more. And so traveling farther out and longer and stuff. And I was trying to run the last year in ’99, we did 150 concerts.

Jamie Duininck (12:09):
Really?

Bob Lepper (12:09):
And I was still running the business and I said, “Guys, this old body is not going to take this much more. So we got to decide,” left it up to the kids and they said, “We want to go full time.” So we sold out, moved to Branson, Missouri and traveled out of there five or six years full time all over the United States. And I was in between that, I was doing some real estate buying and selling some fixer-upper houses and that kind of thing. And that went on till ’08 when Jim called. And then by ’09 or ’10, I was up here pretty much all the time.

Jamie Duininck (12:52):
How old were your kids during that time, when they were-

Bob Lepper (12:56):
When we started, the kids were seven and nine, and my wife has been singing all of her life and very good with harmonies, taught them to sing harmony, driving down the road in a car playing cassette tapes, and they picked up the harmony, which was the nucleus of what they did, close harmony stuff. So that’s how all that started and we ended it, it was because they got old enough that they wanted to have kind of their own life, make their own way.

Jamie Duininck (13:35):
Understood.

Bob Lepper (13:36):
But it was a good experience. I wouldn’t trade it for anything because of what it did for the kids, because we left what you call the product table in that industry, the CDs, whatever you had to sell on your product table, we left it up to the kids. That was their thing. You just tell us what you need me to order and we will get it, but you guys arrange it, you guys deal with the public there after the concerts, you sell it, keep track of all the books and today they’re both entrepreneurs.

(14:10):
They both got their own businesses doing well, and I think a lot of that is because of that training, that opportunity. They learned to meet any age person and have a conversation with any age person. I told them, “Don’t you look at the floor, when somebody’s talking to you, you look at their eyes, you meet them and you talk to them, and you’d be interested in their life.” And they picked that up, and I think they carried that on into what they do now.

Jamie Duininck (14:39):
Yeah, great story. And I’m glad I asked that part because I just think about things that I learned early on in my life and some of the similar, and I can remember many times where I’d be traveling with my dad and one particular one, I remember right when you were saying that, of being in an airport and him saying, “Hey, I know that guy over there. Go introduce yourself.” And I’m maybe eight years old, and obviously it had a profound impact on me because telling it today at 52.

(15:12):
But how those life lessons around meeting people and how you engage people and look them in the eye and don’t shake a hand like a dish rag, have a little something in your hand when you shake. So cool story. Thanks for sharing that. And I think a lot of that leads back to the premise of this discussion with how this came about with Jacob and some of what I see in you, just helping others, whether it’s your own kids or other people.

(15:44):
So Jacob, talk a little bit about some of the beginnings of that when you guys are working together, you have your own business, but wealth of knowledge here, and how’d that go from a personal standpoint connecting?

Jacob Handsaker (15:58):
Connecting. Yeah, we never envisioned, never imagined we’d be where we’re at today for sure. And we bought that excavator just like Bob said, just to work around the farm and do a little bit of this and that. And I remember the conversation when we bought the tile plow that, “Well, we will maybe do enough tile for some other people, just enough that we can take the edge off tiling all our own farms,” and well, I can kind of like the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. It’s a lot of that situation that we’ve done some of our farms, but it really blew up and we were able to go out there and with Bob’s leadership and guidance that we did things from the get-go and Bob having the reputation that he did in our home area. Like he said, he grew up five miles away from where my dad grew up and families and known each other our whole lives and everything.

(17:05):
And having that consistency that these farmers weren’t out there hiring Radcliffe Excavating with a couple kids that just graduated from college not too long ago, and they’re just trying to find their way. They’ve got the guidance and that took us leaps and bounds from where we would’ve been.

(17:29):
And I am sure I haven’t thanked Bob enough for that guidance and entrance into the world of excavation and drainage and just business in general, understanding what to do and him having done it himself and guide us through, “Well, how should we build this and how should we learn? Well, we under billed this, we need to learn to do this right next time.” And doing the change of those things. And then just meant working with ourselves and teaching us how to do it the right way. And then as we started to add employees to help them and help us with management of employees and working alongside everybody and integrating it all into the family atmosphere that he was accustomed to as well. It’s just a big ball that we kind of shoved all together.

Jamie Duininck (18:24):
Yeah, yeah and everyone has a story, and the story here is probably not in some ways, not unsimilar to other things where you look back and you say, “Wow, those pieces actually fit together or that actually worked that way,” but on the other hand, this story is pretty unique, because you just don’t see it happen that way very often.

Bob Lepper (18:52):
One of the things I enjoyed about that whole arrangement was watching somebody else learn. I just thought that was cool.

Jamie Duininck (19:00):
Yeah, and younger people that are passionate and want-

Bob Lepper (19:06):
Yeah, they had the passion to do it and they learned quick, and I just thought that was cool.

Jamie Duininck (19:12):
Bob, what kind of advice do you have for not necessarily Jacob, you’ve probably given him all your advice already, but for younger people that are wanting to be entrepreneurs and wanting to do things on their own?

Bob Lepper (19:26):
You got to have the passion. And I always looked at it as a long game, not get rich quick. I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that and climb a ladder, whatever. This is what I want to do. I’m going to be in dirt the rest of my life and so that’s what I did. Lot of hours. There was nights in the ’80s there, and ’90s, work all day get done with a job. Of course, the sun don’t go down to nine o’clock, so between nine and ten o’clock, back to the shop to get the low boy and go load the dozer back, go move it to the next site so I can be out there six o’clock the next morning and start digging when the sun comes up.

(20:09):
Your season is relatively short, not this year though, but normally. And so I didn’t take summer vacations for 15 years. Do something in the winter when the grounds froze, and it takes that passion. Any business, both my kids, as I said, are in business and they do the same things. The hours are endless, but their businesses are growing.

Jamie Duininck (20:37):
And it’s not work when you’re enjoying it and having fun.

Bob Lepper (20:40):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jamie Duininck (20:41):
Jacob, kind of same question. You’re on a little different spectrum and right in the middle of your career, but how do you think about that? What would you tell?

Jacob Handsaker (20:50):
The biggest thing that I would say has benefited us is be looking for the ways to improve, the ways that it doesn’t… It’s not always going to be done the way it’s always been done.

(21:06):
And especially you look at from where we started, just the technology that has come about with drainage and excavators and dozers, and 3D guidance and design and just everything. There’s not an industry out there that’s sitting stagnant. They’re all changing, but the amount of brain power that’s being put into agriculture and drainage and know what your customers want and drainage, especially designing those full-scale maps and showing the client, this is what I want to do and this is how we should do it. And not just because it’s always been done, but this is what the science says. And to learn that and be very, very capable of disseminating that information to your client and your customer and be willing to help other people out.

(22:05):
Be part of peer groups and be… We don’t have to be in the drainage industry world, I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening to this that are friends that I consider friends and many more acquaintances, and we all kind of live in the same world here and be able to be willing to reach out and ask questions and when asked the question, offer that advice. So be willing to adapt and change and try new things.

Jamie Duininck (22:35):
Yeah, I think probably in all industries, but you get in our industry and you figure something out and you get better at it, you get better at it, you get better at it and at some point though, you kind of forget that and you just start doing it that way. Now we’ve perfected it and there’s no way to do it better. And so I think it’s always really important to stay curious. I know with me, I can tell you times where I haven’t done that and it hasn’t been, the results haven’t been good. So staying curious around how we can continue to improve in all aspects of life are at, even as we get older and is really important.

(23:17):
So guys, thanks for being part of The Water Table today and for sharing your story. It’s part of what we do is a lot of The Water Table is about education, but I think just in talking to you and about your story, there’s a lot to learn from it. So thanks for being part of it. Thank you.

Bob Lepper (23:33):
Thank you.

Jacob Handsaker (23:34):
Thank you.