Jimmy Kinley, CEO, Kinley Construction
As a sixth-generation leader at Kinley Construction, Jimmy Kinley has deep roots in the family business. From an early age, he spent time on job sites with his grandfather and father, J.L., gaining firsthand insights into the construction world.
Throughout college, Jimmy took on labor-intensive roles, working side-by-side with welders and other site crews, tackling various tasks to support the team. This hands-on experience allowed him to learn the business from the ground up. Since then, he has continued to engage with every level of the organization, understanding the diverse perspectives from field teams to the executive suite.
Over the course of his career, and during his father’s tenure as CEO, Jimmy has held leadership positions across more than 23 companies, ranging from startups to acquisitions. This breadth of experience has enriched his extensive network of industry and leadership contacts and further honed his leadership skills.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
00:01 Introduction
Welcome to playmakers talk show where business owners, professionals and entrepreneurs gather to discover playmaking ideas for success. Your host is internationally recognized speaker, facilitator, and author, Steve Kline, who sits down with fascinating playmakers who have made themselves and their company successful. Steve will introduce you to CEO’s and executives who discuss their plan.
00:00:22 Introduction
Path towards success and now it’s time to meet this shows playmaker. Here’s your host, Steve Kline.
00:30 Steve Klein
Welcome to playmakers talk show. This week’s episode is about a 128 year old company that now features construction.
00:37 Steve Klein
In the studio today as a guest who believes there is no finish line in business. Today’s playmakers business is based on Reputation, Excellence, Service, Trust, and Relationships. Since 1895 with us today as a CEO whose motto is, let’s go, this great playmaker is Jimmy Kinley. Jimmy is CEO of Kinley Construction.
00:59 Steve Klein
As the 6th Generation CEO of Kinley Construction, Jimmy Kinley grew up in his family’s construction business. In his early days, he’d visit job sites with both his grandfather and his father, JL.
01:11 Steve Klein
During his college years, Jimmy worked labor roles in the ditches assisting welders or doing whatever needed to be done on job site teams. He learned the business from literally the ground up. Since college, he’s been exposed to and work with all levels of the organization, learning and perspectives and styles of colleagues and supervisors from the field to executive ranks.
:01:33 Steve Klein
Over his career in his father’s tenure as CEO, Jimmy has had leadership roles in over 23 companies, including startups and acquisitions. This experience has resulted in his ever growing and expanding vast network of industry and leadership connections, and has personally great skills and experience. I think there’s something here we’re going to have fun talking about.
01:52 Steve Klein
Jimmy, welcome to The Playmakers Talk Show.
01:54 Jimmy Kinley
Glad to be here.
01:55 Steve Klein
Well, you did something a lot of people from Texas didn’t do when you went to school. You left the state.
02:01 Steve Klein
And went to Penn State for your college education. I understand you never had been to Pennsylvania. Why did you pick Penn State?
02:12 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah. So, never, never actually been to Pennsylvania, but my family roots are all Western New York. So Western New York was always the.
02:20 Jimmy Kinley
The home away from home for me. So when my dad, my mom, they both grew up South of Buffalo. If you look back at our family roots and even company roots that it all was Western New York.
02:31 Jimmy Kinley
And it always was just it was a place that I just loved it. You know, they got these things called seasons up there that you don’t have down here in Texas.
02:39 Steve Klein
Seasons, that’s an interesting concept.
02:41 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah. So I I felt like, you know, I was actually the first Kinley to ever go to college.
02:46 Steve Klein
After being the 6th Generation 5 before, you didn’t go to college.
02:50 Jimmy Kinley
Yes. And I actually you might even say I might have been the first one to actually.
02:54 Jimmy Kinley
Graduate high school, I mean we.
02:56 Jimmy Kinley
We we may be able to check that we have to Fact Check that.
02:59 Jimmy Kinley
Uhm, but I there was something in me that I think was that was driving to do something big. Different. How often in time to get a chance to in life to just like hit the reset button go where nobody knows who you are. That could be scary, but that’s actually you get to really write your own script.
03:19 Jimmy Kinley
So it was. It was a huge learning opportunity for me to figure out who I was and at the top of all that it was it was a hell of a football school.
03:29 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah. So day one, I actually met my wife and there it was that, you know, Cliche met my wife day one in college. I literally met her day one. And and that’s a whole. That’s a funny story. But I can tell you the, the, the relationships I built from that with the friends that I
03:44 Jimmy Kinley
Met.
03:45 Jimmy Kinley
Came out with the wife.
03:46 Jimmy Kinley
I mean, you kidding me? Like, that’s like, the greatest four years you could have probably imagined.
03:50 Steve Klein
Well, you met her the first day. How long was it before you knew that this was going to be your future wife?
03:55 Jimmy Kinley
Well, I can tell you day one, we both said heck no. I mean, I remember the first time I saw her. I walked in and and we were it was move in day.
04:03 Jimmy Kinley
and I remember looking in that room, and it was a, you know, 11 by 14 room and I see her with three of her family members. And there were more clothes stacked to the ceiling than you could imagine. And I was like, oh, my gosh, that is definitely not my girl. And I and as she takes the clothes and moves them down.
04:24 Jimmy Kinley
so she could see who I was. Her first response was “who the heck were socks with flip flops?” I was on the way to the gym. You know, you’re you’re not gonna wear your basketball shoes at the gym, and that is the first. Her and her whole family remembers me as the guy who wore socks with sandals. And that was a big no-no. So both of our first responses.
04:43 Jimmy Kinley
Nope. No thanks. Uh, I don’t know. Going out a couple of.
04:46 Jimmy Kinley
Nights.
05:02 Jimmy Kinley
Hey, here’s a chance for something new,
05:04 Jimmy Kinley
Right?
05:06 Jimmy Kinley
One trip down to Texas, and that’s all, I think that’s.
05:08 Jimmy Kinley
All she needed.
05:08 Steve Klein
So I was going to ask you, being an Eagles fan, as we were talking about before the show started, she sounds like she’s become a Texan.
05:15 Jimmy Kinley
She hasn’t, yet with the asterisk being she’s still an Eagles fan and I I will say there’s zero hope of her ever becoming a Cowboys fan.
05:24 Steve Klein
And that’s not a small asterisk either.
05:26 Jimmy Kinley
No, that is exclamation point with the whole. Yeah. And not only that, but she’s actually really crossing the line and and brainwashing our kids into be Eagles fans as well, which was not part of the deal
05:37 Jimmy Kinley
So she’s already breaking.
05:40 Jimmy Kinley
The law on that one.
05:42 Steve Klein
This will be interesting as your children grow older to see what actually ends up happening.
05:45 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah. “Boo Cowboys. Go Eagles” I think it’s like some of their first words. And I was like, “where did they learn that?” You know, I said I.
05:54 Jimmy Kinley
Didn’t tell them.
05:54 Jimmy Kinley
Earmuffs become a real thing.
06:02 Jimmy Kinley
You gotta go in the other room. Moms having a moment. You know, the the Eagles just threw 1 interception and the, you know, the season’s over, you know, so let’s let her have her moment and you know, you can come back. She she doesn’t mean those.
06:12 Jimmy Kinley
Things.
06:12 Steve Klein
That she’s saying, I promise. Let’s go back to your business before you went to college, Penn State. Did you know you were going to become?
06:22 Steve Klein
CEO and is that something you wanted to do?
06:25 Jimmy Kinley
I did always feel like I was going to have a role with, with the, with the.
06:28 Jimmy Kinley
With.
06:28 Jimmy Kinley
The people, honestly, you know the company itself. I didn’t know what that was back in the day. What’s a company? An organization? But I could tell you what I did know is the people that I was growing up with, the people in the business. They were people that no matter what I was going to do, I did decide that I’m going to work with these with these.
06:45 Jimmy Kinley
Folks.
06:46 Jimmy Kinley
Uh.
06:47 Jimmy Kinley
I knew that it was rare to have as much fun as seeing what these people were having and also working and accomplishing some really cool things in business. So that part was was decided for myself no matter what. But my path to getting the CEO.
07:03 Jimmy Kinley
That was one I could have. That’s a script I could have never written. Yeah. In fact, my dad being in my mom, both being super supportive of me to go live my life, go to Penn State. There was no script that they wrote for me. Whatever I was feeling called to do, they were 100% supportive, including letting me go to school.
07:23 Jimmy Kinley
1500 miles.
07:24 Jimmy Kinley
Way even going graduating from college, I wanted to get my own job. I wanted to not be the handout kid.
07:31 Steve Klein
Were you in the construction business outside of Kinley?
07:34 Jimmy Kinley
No, never went into construction. I’ll be honest. Construction I, although I love to trade, I I wanted to get a breadth of experience. Didn’t think it would lead to me doing what I did at a college which was work for Dick’s Sporting Goods. You know in retail as a manager. The big reason why I did that.
07:53 Jimmy Kinley
was because they could get me back to Texas because they had stores all over the country, they recruited heavily out of Penn State because there out of Pittsburgh and I tell you that that opened up my mind to a Fortune 500 company.
08:21 Jimmy Kinley
Like you know, hey.
08:22 Jimmy Kinley
I really missed the business I missed.
08:24 Jimmy Kinley
The.
08:24 Jimmy Kinley
People. So I got plugged back into the family business after after a stint in Retail.
08:28 Steve Klein
What did you learn at Dick’s? That has helped you as a CEO in the construction business?
08:36 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah. The biggest take away I got from working retail.
09:01 Jimmy Kinley
20 years, 30 years. I remember there was a guy in the pro shop that was.
09:06 Jimmy Kinley
Probably 30-40 years into it. Who’s this kid coming in? You know, with with this role kind of. Tell me what to do. So I quickly learned the value of respect and the value of a relationship. And eventually that guy that has been doing it for 30-40 years tells me, “hey, you do what you say you’re going to do.”
09:25 Jimmy Kinley
And I love that. And I’ll go anywhere with you, man, like. And so you started feeling like the camaraderie that can come. And in retail, everything is fast. There’s no. Hey, let’s you know if there’s something going on that day, you address it. So I learned like, the really fast-paced way of managing people.
10:01 Jimmy Kinley
When you think About it.
10:01 Steve Klein
You mentioned relationships being similar between sporting goods, retail and construction business.
10:08 Steve Klein
I would think that is a big part of it because construction is a commodity. Same thing with retail. You can lay you can lay do so much. But.
10:17 Steve Klein
It’s all about.
10:18 Steve Klein
Customer service and how you take take care of your customers. My guess is that you probably learned a lot of that at Dick’s and you probably brought a lot of it with you to Kinley Construction.
10:29 Steve Klein
Maybe not consciously, but unconsciously. Would you agree with that?
10:33 Jimmy Kinley
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, a Fortune 500 company, there’s a lot of things that they have mastered, including having a culture.
10:42 Jimmy Kinley
That started in a really small, you know, retail spot in Pittsburgh to now have over 500 stores and every store you go into every store has a culture that is somewhat birthed out of this little tiny store that used to sell, you know, fishing tackle and bait. That’s how it started.
11:01 Jimmy Kinley
To now be the company it is today. You know, that’s So what I was learning through them is just how does culture live and breathe and be copy and pasted very purposefully, you know, throughout the country.
11:14 Jimmy Kinley
And I was like, hey, culture is a big thing. You know, the word culture really started coming alive. And, you know, the way that they brought in new people, the way they had, uh, people that have been there for a while.
11:25 Jimmy Kinley
There’s 20 year vets there that says something about the company and I.
11:28 Jimmy Kinley
Was.
11:28 Jimmy Kinley
Like then sorry, connecting it to the construction side. Hey, we have 20 year vets, 30 year Vets, 40 year vets. So this was just the intro into real world like how important culture and people in that alignment.
11:41 Jimmy Kinley
You know how to master that.
11:43 Steve Klein
That’s why one of the best the two of the best things you ever did, or three of the best things meeting your wife going to Penn State and then working her Dicks probably gave you a better perspective of the construction business and.
11:55 Steve Klein
I want to talk about your metric culture. I want to talk about that more now too, because I think it was your great, great, great, great grandfather that began the company in in 1895, Adam Kinley.
12:07 Steve Klein
Talk about that because it wasn’t construction business, talk about the, the the move from what he did in 1895 to where you are today.
12:16 Jimmy Kinley
Yes. So what happened back in the 1890s – I’m going to talk like I was…
12:19 Jimmy Kinley
There, you know.
12:22 Jimmy Kinley
He he was involved in the tannery business and that’s how Kinley started in Western New York.
12:26 Steve Klein
In Western New York.
12:28 Jimmy Kinley
Yes, which a lot of people don’t know. Western New York is about a complete opposite of New York City. You know, where has much concrete as New York City has as much trees and wilderness and nothingness. It’s country. Yes, it’s God’s country is, is if they would. If they’re going to tell you how it is.
12:38 Steve Klein
Country.
12:45 Jimmy Kinley
Being in the tannery business, what happened was they they were. They were the biggest supplier of leather goods.
12:52 Jimmy Kinley
Supplying the Boston market.
12:55 Jimmy Kinley
And and as you know, leather goods end up getting like actually outsourced become a commodity what they had to do is first of all to get to leather goods, they had to have a whole lot of bark.
12:55 Jimmy Kinley
And and as you know, leather goods end up getting like actually outsourced become a commodity what they had to do is first of all to get to leather goods, they had to have a whole lot of bark.
13:07 Jimmy Kinley
So the hemlock bark of the trees in that area is what actually allow them to have a tannery in that area. So I don’t know if that was his initial plan for moving Western New York or if he got there and said, “hey, these are the resources available, let’s do it and let’s make”
13:21 Jimmy Kinley
This.
13:21 Jimmy Kinley
Happen eventually they had to evolve when whenever oil was discovered, a lot of people don’t know it was discovered in Western New York.
13:28 Jimmy Kinley
Based in Western Pennsylvania, that’s where it all started. So the transition from tannery to oil and gas was a means of survival and a means of opportunity.
13:38 Steve Klein
Interesting that the the two big sources of oil initially in this country were Pennsylvania area and Texas. And wherever you spend all your time, Pennsylvania and Texas.
13:47 Jimmy Kinley
Yes.
13:51 Jimmy Kinley
That’s maybe there’s no no coincidence there.
13:55 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah, I mean that’s that’s that’s kind of how the evolution happened. Texas, everyone thinks Texas is where oil was, you know, started and it really was, is where it’s revolutionized, that would say, but really starting in the hills of Western New York and, you know, Kinley was one of the top producers there in terms of quality and service and the people there.
14:15 Jimmy Kinley
I’ll be honest, there’s people that have transitioned from three generations of Kinley that started at the oil and gas fields of Western New York, went to Texas, went across the country, you know, working for Kinley. I mean, we have a 50 year vet with the company started when he was 16 years old with my dad.
14:33 Jimmy Kinley
You know, work in school. They kind of, you know, priority wise. Let’s go have fun in the oil fields of Western New York.
14:41 Steve Klein
Well, you were talking about Western New York, and we’ve talked about Texas, but you’re in, I think, about four other states too, aren’t you?
14:47 Jimmy Kinley
We are actually in, you could say we’re almost in all 50 states right now. We have 5 or 6 office locations. We just opened up another one in Seattle, Denver, Houston, Kansas City.
15:00 Jimmy Kinley
You know New York, we’ve got 2 office locations in Western New York. We we are going where the people are.
15:07 Jimmy Kinley
That’s what we’re doing, and and Kinley has always had a presence for the last 40 years, at least in the construction side across the country. And So what we’re really doing is establishing a footprint and realizing the talent, quite honestly, if you’re in Denver, looking at the Colorado Rockies, it’s a hard sell to get somebody to.
15:24 Jimmy Kinley
Move to Arlington, TX.
15:27 Jimmy Kinley
So we’re we’re going where the people are.
15:28 Jimmy Kinley
And we’re figuring.
15:29 Jimmy Kinley
Now.
15:30 Jimmy Kinley
Again, the Dicks Sporting Goods model, a lot of other companies is how do you take a culture and how do you expand it and keep it alive, you know, throughout the country we’re learning that like right now.
15:40 Steve Klein
Well, something that your predecessors really didn’t have to deal with as much because you weren’t as as spread out and the country is changing and the market is changing too. So what is your major?
15:46 Jimmy Kinley
Exactly, yeah.
15:51 Steve Klein
Focus in construction. What? What do you build primarily?
15:55 Jimmy Kinley
The best way to describe is we are a fueling construction company. So anytime fuel is transferring, we’re involved with it, but we’re not pipeliners. So is it is a very clear distinction. You know we’re not laying miles and miles of pipe, we’re at the collection facility. So at an airport for example.
16:15 Jimmy Kinley
We will install everything from the Tank Farm that holds all the jet fuel and all of the piping and infrastructure that goes all the way to where somebody actually plugs in a hose to fill up the jet or the plane.
16:26 Jimmy Kinley
So all that infrastructure that nobody sees, yeah, that’s us.
16:30 Steve Klein
So no one gets to see the end results of what kindly construction does. Plus you’re different than most construction companies. That’s your unique area that you’re focused on. Yeah, do many other companies do what you do?
16:43 Jimmy Kinley
We have competitors in everyone of our markets and when you look back, we’re in four, four specific markets. You got airports, railroad.
16:53 Jimmy Kinley
Uhm, the government section. And then we are in the midstream space so.
16:59 Jimmy Kinley
Nowhere do we see, you know, competitors, you know across all four. But we’ve got competitors that are in each one of those. So really to to be where we’re at in these industries for 40 years, lightning struck 4 times, you know, for that to happen. And so there’s your, there’s your light bulb moment. How unique of a position Kinley’s in to have the history and the.
17:20 Jimmy Kinley
Experience in markets that have done nothing but expanded, you know tremendously.
17:26 Jimmy Kinley
Where maybe 40 years ago, they were barely even talked about, so, you know Kinley, right place right time, right people. You know, we’re waking up 40 years later and saying, wow, what? Look at the opportunities we’ve got at our fingertips right now, let’s not waste.
17:40 Jimmy Kinley
It.
17:40 Steve Klein
Let’s switch it just a little bit here you are, CEO, you are the 6th generation CEO of this company. How long you been a CEO?
17:48 Jimmy Kinley
So I became CEO of Kinley at the parent level five years ago.
17:53 Steve Klein
And how much time did you actually spend in the company working prior to becoming CEO?
17:58 Jimmy Kinley
I’m 36 this year, so 36 years.
18:03 Steve Klein
You’ve been immersed
18:04 Steve Klein
When did you get your first
18:08 Steve Klein
job
18:09 Steve Klein
With the company and what were you
18:10 Jimmy Kinley
I mean, I if there’s anybody on the labor law side, I probably can’t answer that.
18:10 Steve Klein
Doing?
18:15 Jimmy Kinley
If there’s anybody on the labor law side, I probably cant answer that… No literally my whole life it it it blends. I don’t really know like working on the summer, summer time. You know, I was heavy into football. It would be, you know, early football practice after that I’m going to work working in the shop, working in the office, you know.
18:31 Jimmy Kinley
It’s always been there. I’ve never really not been. I don’t care who’s painting a fence. And then, hey, when that fence is done, go paint it again. Like it was almost a rite of passage into Kinleys. You got someone got to go paint a fence first.
18:42 Steve Klein
That, you know, 10 years old, they’re working for for Dick’s Sporting Goods is probably the best things ever happen to you because you got a chance to see your perspective.
18:50 Steve Klein
That you couldn’t see working here?
18:53 Jimmy Kinley
Yes. And that actually led to an exit from the Kinley Construction company five years ago. So five years ago, actually, I left the main source of my my career, which was, can the Kinley Construction working as a Project Manager. I actually left the business.
19:09 Jimmy Kinley
I left it for a few reasons, but one key reason was I felt like if if my path forward is with this company.
19:18 Jimmy Kinley
That I know that these four walls I’m asking a lot of this company to give me the the experience that I feel like this company and the people deserve.
19:28 Jimmy Kinley
It sounds weird. It’s a very selfish and unselfish thing that I did. It was very difficult decision overall to walk away from, you know, a business that had my name on the door. But I I knew that the world had something else that I probably needed to go get some experience in.
19:43 Jimmy Kinley
So in doing that, a whole world opened up. My entrepreneurial spirit came alive. I got to really, really put that to work, started up some things from scratch, started consulting with some businesses, started getting asked to get involved in things that.
19:59 Jimmy Kinley
I’m.
19:59 Jimmy Kinley
Like yes, I I feel like I’m alive.
20:03 Jimmy Kinley
Right now and it opened up not only a bunch of experience for me, but a network of people that we are tapping every single day and putting that network to work.
20:14 Jimmy Kinley
That I would never had if I would have stayed.
20:16 Steve Klein
Well. I guess you were also an entrepreneur too, in that you’ve developed a lot of businesses over and above the business that’s 120 years old. What else have you started?
20:28 Jimmy Kinley
So the the very first thing that happened after I left was somebody called me name is Brian Grossman. He called me within 24 hours later, and I remember staring. I remember I was in a dark corner, staring at my feet, saying, what the heck did I just do? I’m I just put myself out into the world.
20:46 Jimmy Kinley
I probably did everything that you wouldn’t advise somebody to do, but no real strong plan about what was next other than.
20:53 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah, let’s see what happens in all intensive persons is I put, I put my career in God’s hands. Say, hey, you fill it up. I tried it my way. Now. Now it’s your turn and I got a call within 24 hours and it was a buddy that has been doing a lot of work with Make-A-Wish. And he said, listen, they want to make this a real thing.
21:13 Jimmy Kinley
Building customized playhouses for Make-A-Wish kids because I’m building 1 right now and I want you to come check it out. That one was a was a bat cave for a kid named.
21:22 Introduction
Tyler.
21:23 Jimmy Kinley
And I got to experience the build and then I got to experience the reveal. And then I got to experience a few months later, the families response to what did that do to to Tyler? But not only Tyler, that the family right life changed.
21:39 Steve Klein
That must have given you more satisfaction than anything else you’d ever done.
21:43 Jimmy Kinley
It gives me. It gives me chills till till this day.
21:44 Steve Klein
It is that buildingwishes.org?
21:47 Jimmy Kinley
Yes, so Building Wishes was born. It started off as wish to play and our business model was, hey, we built stuff all over this country. Like you look at what Kinley’s been able to do. Brian Grossman being a local GC.
22:00 Jimmy Kinley
You see.
22:01 Jimmy Kinley
Has built stuff. There’s nothing that we can’t build with our heads combined, these are 8 by 12 playhouses, right? Heck yeah, we can do that. Yes, we can do that. So Wish To Play started. And what we wanted to do is almost like a Tom shoe model. Build some playhouses, take the profits and and be able to donate to Make-A-Wish.
22:21 Jimmy Kinley
All the requests came from make a wish like they started flooding it once they saw that and they saw that, hey, we’ve got somebody really wants to dedicate time to this. The Playhouse request started like piling up.
22:32 Jimmy Kinley
In the last five years, we’ve done over 50 playhouses.
22:35 Steve Klein
So it sounds like it’s self-sustaining it just just just keeps growing. The more you’re doing.
22:39 Jimmy Kinley
Yes. Yeah.
22:40 Steve Klein
And it sounds like it could get out of hand too. In terms of the way you focus on businesses. Yeah, and that seems where your passion is right now.
22:48 Jimmy Kinley
Absolutely. Yeah. You got to, you know, you talk about grounding yourself and and humbling yourself. I’m very thankful for that. I got 3 healthy kids and you realize, like, there’s a lot of people in this world that need.
23:00 Jimmy Kinley
some help
23:01 Jimmy Kinley
And if you’re not careful, the business world will just suck you in and and it takes you away from your family. It takes away from all those things that really matter. Go get tied to make a wish. Go get tied to some families that are struggling, that kids have been dealt an unfortunate hand.
23:15 Jimmy Kinley
And go build an 8 by 12 Playhouse and watch what it does to.
23:18 Jimmy Kinley
Their.
23:18 Jimmy Kinley
Life. Oh my gosh. It’s like you have to. I will never not be tied to something like that because it’s so rewarding.
23:26 Jimmy Kinley
Uhm, it’s fulfilling and you actually feel like you really are making a difference.
23:31 Steve Klein
What I like about what you’re doing is it takes them away from that those handheld things they do sitting on the couch, working on an iPad or a or a phone and actually playing and using their imagination in in a construction. This is not just for them.
23:46 Jimmy Kinley
Exactly. And when you really look at it like all.
23:48 Jimmy Kinley
We want to.
23:49 Jimmy Kinley
Do is if I go back in time, every kid just wants to be a kid.
23:55 Jimmy Kinley
When was your? You know your greatest memories or playing with your friends on a playground or on a Playhouse? A tree fort, right? Everybody can relate to that. You go do this for a kid and and and it’s so fun to see them come alive talking about what do they want in their Playhouse. Right. I mean one kid wanted one kid wanted a a cabinet.
24:15 Jimmy Kinley
Full of Dorito chips.
24:17 Jimmy Kinley
That was it. That’s all you want is like, OK, what else you want? He’s like, ohh. And then he comes alive, right? Oh, I want to put a jail in there so I can throw my brother in there whenever he makes me mad, you know?
24:27 Jimmy Kinley
They just like was like, OK, we can do that too.
24:29 Steve Klein
And they want things that you would never have thought of this crazy, weird stuff that’s in their head. But that’s why their imagination is so great. And you’re given the opportunity to use that imagination with what you’re building, I would think.
24:31 Jimmy Kinley
Now yes.
24:40 Jimmy Kinley
Yes. And and Brian’s a mastermind with this, he can take a napkin sketch. Hand it to his crew and you know here go build this go build this Hobbit house. You want a pirate ship? Boom. Let’s do it and.
24:52 Jimmy Kinley
It’s limitless, and that’s that’s what always what I was looking for is once you tap something, that’s like where’s the end and you don’t see it? I’m in.
25:02 Steve Klein
What do your kids think about this?
25:04 Jimmy Kinley
They think that’s all I do. For a while I was like, I built playhouses for kids. Dad, can I have?
00:25:08 Jimmy Kinley
A Playhouse. I’m.
25:09 Jimmy Kinley
Like no, you.
25:09 Jimmy Kinley
Know we all got time for that, yeah.
25:11 Steve Klein
I can see them at school selling their friends with with their dad does. Oh, he builds playhouses.
25:15 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah, and and cool. I love it. You know, what do we do? We help. We help kids that are sick or disabled in some way. And we give them, we give them a Playhouse. You know, they.
25:24 Jimmy Kinley
They do start to understand the significance of it.
25:27 Steve Klein
It’s pretty cool compared to what Kinley Construction does for a living
25:31 Steve Klein
Dealing and working in the oil business, I can see how playhouses are a lot more exciting and there’s more color to what you’re doing in your life, especially when you’re taking care of helping kids that didn’t have wouldn’t have a chance to use these things.
25:45 Jimmy Kinley
And you see how much people want to get tied to this. And we found out people were getting mad when they found out what we were doing. And why haven’t you told us this? We want to. So what we’re doing now is we’re tying it to a companies like corporations that say, hey.
26:00 Jimmy Kinley
I want to do something with my team. I want my team to feel.
26:03 Jimmy Kinley
A part of.
26:03 Jimmy Kinley
Something cool. You can be a part of now. Our company. We’ve got our business model.
26:08 Jimmy Kinley
Set up where.
26:09 Jimmy Kinley
We’ll take the donations. The donations go to the Playhouse, and now they get to be involved in a work day. They get to sit on the zoom calls with the kids and I can tell you it changes their life.
26:20 Jimmy Kinley
You know, so it’s it spreads and that’s what you know Home Depot when you go out and start buying this stuff, they start.
26:26 Jimmy Kinley
Finding out what you’re building it for.
26:28 Jimmy Kinley
They want to know. Hey, how’s it going? Can I see some pictures? Like, you know, we want to know what’s going on.
26:34 Steve Klein
There, there’s no selling it at all because people want to get.
26:37 Steve Klein
Involved.
26:37 Steve Klein
With them, that’s that’s wonderful. This has been a a wonderful conversation. And and I came in thinking I’d speak. I find out more about Kinley Construction, which I guess I have.
26:37 Jimmy Kinley
That’s it exactly.
26:48 Steve Klein
But it’s all about the the interest you have and how this has grown and build has been building ever since 1895 and we haven’t talked about all the iterations, but it started right there. How would somebody get ahold of you if they want to find out more about anything that you’re doing?
27:04 Jimmy Kinley
I think on Kinley Construction you can do it Building Wishes. There’s a there’s a way to reach out there. LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn all the time. I’ve got a lot of people that.
27:17 Jimmy Kinley
I got my cell phone number. It doesn’t bother me, you know.
27:20 Steve Klein
Well, if nothing else, I could find you from kinleyconstruction.com and it’s also on our website so they can find you there. Jimmy, this has been a wonderful interview. This is really a lot of fun talking to you and.
27:24 Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
27:30 Jimmy Kinley
Yeah.
27:31 Steve Klein
You’re doing and people can’t see your face, but that there’s this this Halo of light around you as you’re smiling with your eyes and based on what you’re doing. So congratulations on all that.
27:40 Jimmy Kinley
Appreciate that. Thank you.
27:42 Steve Klein
And thank you for being a guest on the show. Join us all again at playmakerstalkshow.com. We get all of our past episodes. That’s playmakers talkshow.com and we’ll be back with more playmakers. See you then.
27:53 Conclusion
We’ve been listening to playmakers talk show with Steve Klein joining Steve again at Playmakers talk show com for more interviews with interesting and successful playmaking CEOs and executives.
