What Are You Building?

I know a contractor with four kids, someone whose story has stayed with me because it’s a reminder of what persistence actually looks like when things don’t go as planned (though in the right direction).

For a long time, he was bidding on job after job and he wasn't winning those projects. Competitive bids and a grind that he told me just felt never ending. Its the same grind so many contractors know well. He’d put in the time, try to make the right relationships, make sure his numbers were right, check his subs for their numbers, and submit his bids. And then he’d wait. And the waiting didn't have a crescendo of someone calling him, telling him the exact reasons he wasn't selected. That would have been amazing, someone on the other side of the phone who would tell him what he needed to do to win a project. No, the responses weren't this personal. They were flat and unceremonious, an email. If he could he would call the client and ask them what he could do better. More often then not, there weren't things he could do better. The jobs went to guys who had a longer resume than he did. Guys who the clients knew longer. And what he recognized much later in his life, guys who had already gone through what he was.

He knew it was part of the business, he knew it was what his own father had gone through when he was a kid. It didn't make it feel any better. The rejections kept coming, the frustration started to build and he told to me "I had never worked that hard in my life and had so little to show for it."

Eventually, he did start winning bids, small ones. Apparenly, he always thought there would be one job that would pay off all his debts. One job that would make all the work worth it. That's not how it went. In his early jobs he had guys in his crew steal from him, on more than one occasion he had subs that took other jobs in the middle of a project. He even got sued. He disagreed with the client and luckily the design plans did as well, but it didn't change having to deal with the legal issues.

During these years of uncertainty, his children were born, all of them. The stakes felt like they were just getting higher and higher each year. The fact he was providing for others was just another layer of stress.

He told me there were years when he seriously thought about changing his business model altogether. Go get a job working for one of the majors. His failings he took personally, he blamed himself for trusting the wrong people. Other issues were things he learned to handle with better legal documents, something he once told himself he had always wanted to stay away from. There was no 'one job' that made it all worth it. He explained to me that for him to become the CEO of his organization, to win the projects worth several hundred million dollars each, and to have the fortitude to work through all the problems over all the years, was hard earned. He explained to me that the only way to earn a position at the top was to take the scars that come with the failures along the way. His philosophy was significanly different than I expected. I thought his goals were going to be based on monetary things that are so common in today's world, the car, the yacht, the... whatever. But no, what he said was "Life is hard for everyone, and it makes the stong stronger and the weak weaker. At each obstacle I just had to decide if I was a strong person or a weak person. The rest handled itself."