Dave Loden – From Zero to Hero Starting with Nothing and Making it Work

She asked me how kindergarten was.

And I said, well, it was okay, but I don't need to go back.

And my day consisted of getting up and going down to the swamp, running my trapline that was about three miles.

And then I'd walk rural tracks on into school.

I always carried a gun with me at that age, a small shotgun or a 22.

And we hunted our way.

And that provided pretty good income for.

ten, eleven year old to apply resources that give people the help they need on the worst day of their life and to maybe even save their life.

uh That's a pretty rewarding thing.

In order to be successful, I was going to do the projects right.

I was going to do them correctly.

And if there was any money left over for me at the end, well, I'd celebrate that.

That's I think some of the best advice you ever gave me and something I've repeated a lot.

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show where we inspire and encourage the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have

been there, done that, and are still getting it done, building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands, and their hustle.

I'm your host, Eric Loden.

If you guys are enjoying the content, please help me out.

Give us a five star review.

like, share, subscribe, follow all of the things that really moves us up in the algorithms and that's the best thing we can do to get the content out there.

This week we have a really special episode for you guys.

ah This is kind of the episode that inspired this whole show.

I recently sold the company that I've been running for the last decade and in the process of that sales transaction the new buyers were in my office.

And uh my dad who started that company came in and sat down and chatted with us.

And they had a lot of questions for him about starting the company and his journey to building um what eventually I took over.

As I sat back and listened to him tell the story to those new buyers, I was just really inspired.

There were parts of that story that came out that I've never heard before.

uh

I imagine there's a lot of people like my dad out there that have an incredible story, have lived an interesting life and just don't have a platform to share it.

So that was kind of the birth of this show is finding people like Dave Lowden who have a cool story to share that is inspiring and interesting.

And so that's what we're doing here is telling interesting stories.

This is an episode I've really been looking forward to.

getting to have Dave Lowden on the show.

So that's what we're doing today.

Dave Lowden is the founder of Dave Lowden Construction, a company he ran for nearly 30 years.

He has also served in search and rescue for over 30 years, many of those years serving as captain.

He is a husband, a father, a grandfather, and my dad.

So we are super excited to have Dave on the show.

So with that, we'll dive right in and dad, welcome to the show.

Thanks for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me.

I just wanted to start by saying how cool of an idea...

Is that camera going?

Okay.

I watched it die and I was trying to figure out how to...

There it is.

All right, back up and run.

Well, thank you for having me.

I'm not sure my story is going to be very inspiring or interesting, but I wanted to first say that I think this is a cool idea.

uh It used to be the theory that you had to go to college to make a good living and that if you didn't go to college, you wouldn't do well.

And I don't think that that necessarily runs true today.

And people need to know that they have options.

And I think the trades are an upcoming thing.

They're not upcoming.

They've been around a long time, but they've been looked down on.

And I think that's going to change.

I think their demand is going to be high.

And I think this concept of showing people how you can get by and make a good living without the college degree, I think, is a great

idea.

So we start off every show diving in early childhood, your background.

Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up?

Well, early childhood, yeah, I can.

My father was in the Air Force, and so I was an Air Force brat.

And that was during the Cold War, and so that brought a whole different level.

We lived on Air Force bases, and we did uh bomb raids instead of fire drills and things like that.

And the men and women that were in the military back then and what they did, they were...

uh

good people to hang out with.

were just good caliber of people and that's all there was for us.

That's where we lived and that's what we did.

The other thing it did for us was we moved a lot.

My dad's job bounced around the country uh quite a little.

so as a younger child in school, uh I had very bright red hair and I was left handed and I was a new kid.

So you can imagine in a classroom back in the 60s that there was some difficulty with that.

So I learned a little bit there.

And other than that, I spent almost all my time that I had any control over outside.

That's where I wanted to live.

That's what I did.

The stories you hear about daylight to dark is exactly what I did.

We left in the morning, me and my friends, and we had to be back by dark.

Usually there was no streetlights where we were, so we didn't have the alarm, but we knew what dark was.

And that's when we had to be home.

I know you don't have a formal education, but can you tell us a little bit about your education?

How did you do in school and what did education look like?

Yeah, yeah, I can talk about that.

My mother always used to tell the story of my first day in kindergarten.

I went to school and came out and she was there to meet and greet me and she asked me how kindergarten was.

And I said, well, it was okay, but I don't need to go back.

And I don't think I ever changed that viewpoint through high school.

I didn't have a lot of use for school and

It was just something you had to do.

you know, I got in trouble once in a while and just did not enjoy school.

So I was glad to graduate when I did.

And having that degree, I had a decision like everybody does, and that's in part what this show's about.

I had three different opportunities to go to college.

And we didn't have a lot of money then at all.

uh And college was expensive, but I had some scholarships that were available to me.

And so I was contemplating the college degree like everybody does.

But as I looked around, I looked at people that I admired, that I looked up to, that I thought had a good lifestyle, one that I would want to have.

And I could find quite a lot of those people.

And it occurred to me they were all self-employed.

And so instead of taking advantage of a scholarship, I set a goal to become self-employed.

And I set that goal to have my own business and livelihood by the time I was 25, which of course seemed like forever in the future.

uh Seven years is a long time when you're 18.

But that was what I strived for.

I know becoming self-employed, becoming your own boss didn't happen immediately.

You worked quite a few jobs between, well, during high school and then between high school and eventually starting the company that you ran for 30 years.

Can you tell us a little bit about some of those jobs and maybe some interesting stories or experiences that you had?

Yeah, you know, as a kid, again, I'll mention that we didn't have a lot of extra money.

And of course, kids want to have extra things.

My parents provided for me quite well.

We did not want for a lot of things except extras.

And if we wanted extras, we needed to go earn the money for that.

So my first uh effort for learning money or earning money

was to run a trapline.

We lived down in Loveland, Colorado, right by a big swamp and an irrigation ditch on some railroad tracks and headed into town where the school was.

And my day consisted of getting up and going down to the swamp, running my trapline that was about three miles.

And then I'd walk railroad tracks on into school.

And this process took an hour and a half, two hours, and I would do that every day before school.

And after school, I would run the reverse.

And all of my trapping stuff I would put under the trestle by the railroad track and pick it back up and run it backwards.

And then when I got home, I had to skin all the muskrats and whatever other kind of critters I may have caught.

And that provided pretty good income for a 10, 11 year old.

I remember I would keep all my pelts until spring.

And when I sawed,

I would ride down to Denver with my dad.

He was teaching college down there.

And there was a fur buyer down there and I would take all my furs for the winter down there.

And on the years that I was doing that, I would make around 800 to $1,000.

And muskrats, you win for about $1.50, $1.80 a piece.

So that was a lot of muskrats.

And so that was my first effort of earning my own money.

And at the time, I thought it was quite successful.

uh

So I know you often ran that trap line on ice skates.

Was that a pretty common thing back then?

No, I don't think so.

The swamp and the muskrats were all on narrow tracks through the uh cattails, and the irrigation ditch just went for miles both directions as they do.

And so I would put my skates on, and I could skate through all the muskrat tracks and over to the ditch and up into the ditch, and then I'd go.

It was a big irrigation ditch, Colorado style.

That's where I would catch other things besides muskrats.

I'd just have uh leg hold sets up and down that ditch.

And it was interesting.

Then I'd get back and hide my skates and go to school.

uh School getting out was a big thing every day.

Hard to wait forward to.

And then I was off outdoors.

I always carried a gun with me uh at that age, a small shotgun or a .22.

I had a good friend that would join me from time to time.

His dad was a veterinarian.

together we spent a great deal of time out in that neighborhood.

It was a thing uh to do.

And then probably my next uh money-making concept was I met an old man down at a grocery store.

We would ride our bikes down to the grocery store to buy candy bars and pop or whatever.

And he had saw us down there several times and he asked me one day if I wanted to make some money.

And I said, well, of course, you know, what's a guy got to do?

And he said that they were tearing down a building downtown Loveland and he was going to bring that debris for that building and put it in a pasture that he owned.

And he was looking for some kids to uh clean those bricks.

And of course, I didn't know what that meant, but I knew he was going to pay us.

So

me and my friend that were drinking our pops and eating our candy bars off, we went to go see what he was doing.

And he showed us how to use a hatchet, clean the bricks, and he gave us the hatchet, told us how to stack them on a uh pallet.

And we took on the project and dump truck after dump truck after dump truck came in there and dropped off these bricks and we'd use sledgehammers to break up the big...

chunks and then we'd clean all the bricks and stack them.

A good thing that we did was, of course, young competitive boys, we would race and see who could fill a pellet first.

Well, we got to go into where we were making about $10 an hour.

And that's pretty good for 11-, 12-year-old back in 71-, 72-years-old.

And we made quite a bit of money doing that.

And I put a lot of that money aside.

And that's what I used to buy my first motorcycle when we moved to Colorado or Wyoming, when we moved to Buffalo from Colorado.

I was just at the age where you could get a learner's permit that included motorcycles.

So when I got here, I was mobile.

I was pretty happy about that.

One other job I took on down there was there was a bunch of cherry orchards.

And the way they got the cherries picked was they just leave the gates open day and night, didn't matter.

And me and my friend, we'd drive our bikes over there and you'd go in and they had three-legged ladders and you would climb those ladders up into the cherry trees and pick

cherries and they would pay you one dollar for every big box that you picked.

So we picked cherries and you would just pile a big pile in the middle of the roadway and pretty soon here come a truck and a guy would load up all your boxes and he would pay you

cash.

So.

oh Looking back, think maybe oh those might have been the early stages of self-employment.

We were on our own out there doing all of those things and it was easy to get sidetracked, but we stayed on task and making money just worked for us.

It was just something we had to do for any extras.

We wanted extras, so we went out and made the money.

When I did move to Buffalo, I had two...

significant jobs or real jobs, I'd say.

One was I ran the night shift at the gas stations, the old red, white and blue gas station out on 4th Street.

I would do the 11 to 7 shift and then go school from 8 to 3.

And I did that all week.

I ran a 40 hour schedule doing that.

So I was again able to make more money doing that.

But the night shift was getting old and

My brother was working at the Crossroads Inn, and that was a going uh operation at the time, very prominent hotel, banquet room and such, and I took on the job as the

maintenance helper.

And that was my junior year in high school, and I just worked after school for a few hours and weekends, and then summer I would work full time, and when I got out of school, ready

to make that decision,

That was kind of tough because by then they had hired three men in front of me to be my supervisor.

And after three, Bob Kinslow, the manager, he decided he'd give me a shot at running that department.

So I had a management position, which seemed like a pretty exciting thing at 18 years old.

And he hired a fellow by the name of Orville Ennis to help me.

I was an 18 year old kid, know nothing.

Orval Ennis was a retired construction superintendent.

He built bridges.

And not only that, he had owned his own motel and he sold that motel.

So he had that self-employment concept that I was looking for too.

And I don't know why he took that job there at the Crossroads, but he did.

And I worked with him for...

probably three years and he taught me so much about how to do things.

You know, we replaced the carpet in 60 rooms several times.

We would replace tiling in the bathrooms and we just took care of everything and painted everything and wow, we did a lot of work.

And supposedly I was the manager and he was my helper, but everybody, including me, knew it was the other way around.

He was teacher, uh not a helper.

um

Anyhow, an interesting thing about Orville, I'll talk a little bit about him later, but I worked with him for two and a half, three years before I came home one day for lunch and

my mom said, hey, did you know that Orville was a preacher?

And I said, Orville, Orville, and it's my friend at work.

And she said, yeah.

And I said, no, he's not.

And she said, yes, he is.

He came to the nursing home.

My mom, also hardworking just like my dad, she worked four to midnights at the nursing home.

And he came in there to give a sermon to the old folks one night.

And so this puzzled me because I had no idea that he was, uh even went to church, much less uh was a preacher.

So the next day, uh first thing I asked him was, hey, my mom said you were...

preaching a sermon to the old folks down at the nursing home.

And he said, yes, I did.

And so we talked about it.

And that's the first time, just unbelievable to me that this guy who I'm going to say he's probably the most Christian individual I've ever met, I worked with him for three years

and didn't have any idea that he went to church.

His example was really a good one.

And he didn't preach to me, did nothing.

I had no idea.

So I...

appreciated what he did there.

And I just learned so much.

And as I set that goal to be self-employed, my job was pretty good by then.

I was making uh a living wage for the time and life was good.

And I don't know that I had much of a reason to make a change.

But as time went on and I got close to that goal,

I decided to make that change and take that leap.

So that walks us through a lot of early jobs, kind of learning some early work ethic.

What is the earliest experience you can remember that shaped your work ethic and how did that set you up to be a leader?

Well, there's no doubt I had a lot of examples of good work ethic.

um Everybody I was around was a hard worker.

My parents uh and all those people I was just mentioning that I had met.

And that's just what you did.

My dad's job as in the Air Force, you know, there was no not doing it.

There was no calling in sick.

There was no getting off early.

There was no taking any days.

You know, when we were in Cheyenne, where I got more memories than I did in earlier days, was the middle of the Cold War, and he ran an intercontinental ballistic missile site.

He was in charge of one of those, and he would take them out there and spend some days and come back.

And I learned that your job was paramount.

And I still believe that today.

Of course, I have a family, and I have grandchildren.

And I get the idea that family's important.

There's no doubt about that.

But in my mind, you gotta take care of that family.

So you gotta house them, you gotta feed them, you gotta clothe them.

And that takes money and you gotta have a job for the money.

So, uh you know, I'm not saying we put jobs before family, but I think they're like equal because how do you take care of your family without your job?

And all the people that I knew that just didn't have an option but to do it, they just did it.

Rain or shine or Sundays or whatever it was, if you had your job to do, you just did it.

And that's how you raised your family.

So you grew up running a trapline, cleaning bricks, and managing the maintenance crew at a motel.

How in the world did you get into...

Okay, well that's a funny enough story.

Norm Myers was an Air Force buddy of my dad and he had a buddy in Caldwell, Idaho.

And that guy was a roofer.

Well, he was going bankrupt in the roofing business.

And Norm Myers came to me and he thought that maybe Buffalo could use a roofer.

And he was in the Conklin business at the time.

which they sold roofing products.

And he thought that if he helped me get in the roofing business, that he could sell a lot of his roofing products.

Not a bad concept either.

So he helped me out.

Of course, I had a good job, but I certainly didn't have enough money to go buy another business or to start.

so the big red flag of that guy going bankrupt is why he's getting out of the roofing business.

I missed it.

I never even thought about that.

looking back, I realized the mid-80s was not a good time for the construction industry and darn sure not a good time for roofers.

And so I was headed into a rough spot before I even knew it.

Norm Myers, he co-signed a loan for me, a $10,000 loan to buy that equipment.

That was a big deal, as everybody knows today, cosigning is not a smart thing to do.

he, and I'll talk some more about mentors later too, but he was one.

And he was one of those Air Force people that were high caliber men that got it done when necessary.

And he thought it was a good idea.

I'm not sure my dad thought it was a good idea, but he did.

And it was time for my goal.

I was 24, coming on 25 pretty soon.

And I saw that as my chance to meet that goal, so I jumped on it.

So you're working a job, making a pretty good living, have set a somewhat arbitrary goal to become self-employed at 25, and get some help to buy a business that is going bankrupt

and going out of business.

As you indicated, that doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

What were those early years like?

How did it look getting started?

Well, I'd have to say two things about it.

First of all, for the early years, they were rough as far as business goes.

The construction industry was in the tank really bad, but my needs were fairly low.

And I didn't know that that was a problem.

I was ignorant to that.

And I was basically just living the dream.

I wanted to be self-employed and I was.

So the first 10 years or so,

I never looked back.

It was like I never went to work.

Roofing is a hard job and I lived on the job site and I did it.

But I was doing what I wanted to do.

I had to do what was in front of me.

And whatever that was, I just did that every day.

I would get up and do whatever that business had in front of me for that day and I felt like I was doing good.

And during those years I also were

was thinking about success.

And success came slowly.

And I don't even know that I would call it success at that time.

anyhow, I had decided, was I a contractor or was I not?

I didn't know what it meant to be a contractor.

And I thought, all right, I'm trying.

And so the more I thought about it, I thought, well, if you're going to call yourself a contractor, you have to have a degree of success.

And you have to be making your living doing that.

And so I decided that I was just trying to be a roofing contractor.

And I decided that at 10 years, if I could make my living at 10 years, I would feel free to call myself a roofing contractor.

So before that, I would always just joke and say, I'm trying to be one.

Although it was working, we were getting along pretty good.

That was my view of those early years.

It was just wonderful.

I didn't know.

They were stressful.

I know your first job as a roofing contractor was actually not a roofing job.

What was that?

Well, that's an interesting point too.

One of the things I didn't realize, you know, as I bought that truckload of tools and brought it back and became a roofing contractor, I had never been on a roof for the

purpose of repairing it before ever.

So I knew nothing about roofing.

I just knew I was in the roofing business.

Well, everybody else knew that I didn't know how to roof either.

So nobody would hire me.

Nobody wanted to be the first person to hire me.

So...

um I started the business supposedly January 1st.

That's when I resigned from my job.

I felt I needed some time to figure out what I was doing, where, get some contracts lined up for the summertime.

And as summer got close, I didn't have anything lined up.

Nobody would hire me for anything.

But I did notice in the newspaper that they had a public bid opening for painting some irrigation pipes south of town that went over the highway.

And I thought,

Huh, I know how to paint.

So I'd painted a lot of things at the crossroads.

And so I went to the pre-bid meetings down in Cheyenne and looked into public bid work.

And I realized that they didn't care whether you had painted before or not.

It didn't matter to them.

The only thing it took to get that job was to be the low bidder.

So I went to my insurance agent, got some SBA guarantees on my bonding capabilities, because I had no net worth.

And they had a nice program that would do that, although it was expensive.

And I went down for my first bid opening and was successful.

And not only was I successful, I was successful by a lot.

My total bid was $8,885.

my competitor, the only one bid, was $23,000 and change.

So of course I sat there knowing that he knew more than me.

How in the heck was I going to get this job done for $9,000 when he needed $23,000?

So I kind of did some engineering on the way I was going to do the job and we left out some of the expensive lifts and equipment, did it all with scaffold.

and I completed that job with a $5,000 profit margin.

Now that was a lot of money for me on that day.

It only took about two weeks and really opened my eyes to that.

But I still wasn't a roofer and I was in the roofing business.

That's what my tools were.

They lended themselves to painting because one of them was an airless sprayer.

So that's what got me started in the public arena instead of the private arena.

But shortly after that, uh a uh fellow, some of you guys may know him, uh Bob Zimmercheid.

He owned the A &W at the time, and he hired me to put the roof on that building.

And I did.

And I very much appreciate him overlooking my ignorance.

I had set a concept of in order to be successful, I was going to do the projects right.

I was going to do them correctly.

And if there was any money left over for me at the end, well, I'd celebrate that.

But my first goal was to do it right.

And I believe that roof is still on that building.

It has had some recodings and it's been worked on, but it is still physically the roof that's on that building 40 years later.

And that was my first one.

uh So that was kind of the start.

And I appreciate Bob Zimmercheid for having the uh faith in me to do that.

That is still the roof that's on that building.

We've looked at it a few times and it served without any issues at all for well over 30 years and just in the last few years has had some uh repairs and and some coding work, but

It well outlasted its expected lifespan.

Yeah Tell us a little bit more about those early years of starting and building the business.

Are there any significant struggles or

wins, highs or lows that stand out in your memory?

Maybe not particular ones, but uh certainly highs and lows.

um The successes were good, the stress was not.

um And I didn't necessarily realize my feelings about that until somebody asked me how I felt about you taking over this business.

And I just blurted it out.

I said, well,

First of all, I wouldn't want to deny anybody the joy and happiness that comes with the success.

But I also would not wish the stresses and pressures on my worst enemy.

So it has both sides, you know.

It's not a piece of cake.

There's some difficulties involved, but yet the rewards were good.

And that's what brought that concept to my attention was when they asked me about you.

And so you started the business in 1985.

You ran it through 2014 when I took over and we just recently sold it a couple weeks ago.

Do you have any thoughts or feelings about the process, the eventual sale, your time running it, my time running it?

Do have any reflections now that we're kind of bringing that story close circle?

I suppose I do have some thoughts about that.

I said that running the business had the highs and lows, the joy of the wins and the pressures of the failures, the stresses of the failures.

I did not realize how when you took over, those stresses were going to continue.

I have worried since that day about the stresses and of course you ran the jobs differently than I did and so

I would look at that and just worry.

I would just think, how does this work?

But of course you were uh making great strides in the business.

It was doing well and I had a lot of joy in watching that.

Again, the highs were great but the stress wasn't.

And then when you sold that business, there went the stress for me, finally.

So that was a good thing and I'm just tickled that this idea of

Being self-employed by 25 has helped me raise my family, helped you raise yours, and now a new chapter is opening for you and for me.

We're going to be doing other different things also.

So life is good.

Yeah, think it was 25 or 26 is when I took over for you.

So I didn't maybe didn't quite meet the same goal, but similar timeline.

And I had not heard the remark about not considering yourself a contractor until you had done it for 10 years before.

So I think I'm one month short of 12 years.

So I made that cut off.

I can officially call myself a contractor.

I think so, yes.

I really think that you made it past the point of trying and can, for good or bad, say that you're successful roofing contractor, yes.

All right.

When were you most afraid in the process of building your business or maybe as a leader and what were the stakes that caused that fear?

Well, I don't know about leadership, but just employment.

When I started, when I first started, I went from job to job to job to job.

I hired a lot of friends and I would bid a job, I would get it, we would go do it, and then I'd come back and then I'd look for another one.

And so we'd have a uh gap in between there.

Sales of roofs was hard then, and so that's the way I did that.

Well, as time went on and...

became more full-time, we started roofing more in the winter, I had full-time employees.

And it was a little sobering to realize that not only is my business supporting my family, but now I'm responsible for other families.

And we had quite a few employees from time to time, and that did supply some stress on that.

I was worried about that for a little while.

then uh one year we were short on help and hired some Romanians on H2B visas.

And these 10 people arrived at our doorstep uh from Romania and they had nothing.

And talk about relying on you.

You know, they were relying on a year's worth of good income.

to make their living and survive while they're here and have something to take back home when they went.

I guess maybe the joke was on me because not all of them went back home.

But the ones that did, that was good.

One of them has gone on to become a U.S.

citizen and I admire this guy a lot.

His bravery for

coming that far and stepping in and doing that work and sticking out the years that it took.

today he's happily married in Florida.

He lives in Florida, works on the North Slope of Alaska and has two children.

He's quite a guy.

And uh watching people do that as your employee was very rewarding.

But then when things were slow and it was hard,

ah It was pretty stressful.

So I think that there was some fear involved with that responsibility.

What do you think is the most unique thing about our business or your journey?

You know, I don't know how unique we are with the exception of how young I was when I started the business.

Every place I went in the roofing business to conventions and to meetings and to bid openings and everything, I was just a kid and, you know, grown older men were my

counterparts.

And I think it was somewhat unusual they all

looked at me like I was crazy and that I couldn't possibly survive in their world.

um Age just kind of went away for me from that job at the crossroads where I was the boss of Orville that was 65.

Of course, we all knew what was going on there.

But here I was, young guy working with the older guy.

And then here I am, young guy bidding jobs with all these older guys.

oftentimes had people employed that uh were older than I was.

uh I think that that was somewhat unique.

I know that a lot of those older people didn't have a very good viewpoint of what I was doing.

And as years went by, uh might have gained some of their respect, but certainly none was there to begin with.

I also think that the size of the town, you know, uh

for somebody to start a roofing business in Buffalo, Wyoming.

Wow, there's not all that many buildings and businesses.

The amount of business that gets done here won't support uh a roofing contractor.

And of course, I didn't know that.

um I often joked for quite a few years when somebody would get a job in town or...

Or somebody would ask if we ever work in town, I would say, well, we had Buffalo Roofed a long time ago.

That was pretty much the case.

A uh fellow, Alan Brooks, I got along with him quite well.

He was the guy at the school that did all the purchasing.

And he recognized the value we brought for long-term roofing.

And he specified products.

And being local, was lucky enough to get most of them.

So we roofed all the schools here.

And that was kind of an early boon to the business and I appreciate his ah respect for me to be able to do that.

So we did a lot of good business together.

I think that probably is something that's unique.

Maybe not as much in our state or our region, but as I talk to roofers throughout the country, the space that we cover and the size that the business has become in the limited

town that we're in.

About two years ago when we first started considering selling the business and had our first offer, I...

ah

talked to a friend of a friend, getting some advice and talking through that process.

And I told him a little bit about our business and what we were doing.

And he listened for a few minutes and he said, wait, where are you from?

Or from a small town in North Central Wyoming, we have a population of about 5,000 people.

So you've probably never heard of it.

He said, you can't, you just can't.

You can't have a business that size in that town.

It doesn't work.

And uh for the last 41 years, we've been doing it.

Yeah, I had similar experience when I was on the board of directors for Western States.

We were sitting out having dinner with some other business owners and they said that I had a meeting in Cheyenne next week for on the capital complexes and he said in Cheyenne, he

said, thought you lived in northern Wyoming and I said, well, I do.

And he said, well, how do you work down there?

And I said, well, we have to work the entire state to get the volume of work we need.

You know, and I said, I also got a job going on in Evanston.

So, you know, both of those jobs were 300 miles from our office.

And he was just mind boggled.

His business was in LA and he said they have a map in their office and they drew a 15 mile radius circle around their office.

And when somebody calls in, if they're outside that circle, they say, thank you.

And so he travels the farthest, 15 miles.

And here we had two jobs in progress, 300 miles in two different directions.

And he just didn't understand how you could do that.

But I've always said Wyoming is a small community and it is.

People are very tight here and you'd be surprised as you travel and work statewide how many know.

oh

You know, you'll be talking to new guy at a new district you've never been to before.

Well, he's good friends with the grocery store owner in another town, you know.

After a few years went by, I rarely went anyplace that people didn't know when I walked in who I was and where I was from.

And it was just because of all the travel and the small community.

It was an interesting tight-knit thing.

Still is.

I think that's only grown as we've expanded the business.

I remember about a year ago, I came into the office and somebody asked me where we were working today and we had a crew in Upton, uh a guy in Powell, a crew down by Rock Springs

and a crew in Cheyenne.

And so I answered, we're in Wyoming.

We have all four corners.

Yeah, yeah, I always joke we had three corners covered because we never went into Yellowstone or Jackson.

So that's about the only neighborhood in Wyoming that I haven't roofed in.

So construction and especially roofing is a pretty high pressure, high accountability business.

How did that shape the way that you lead people?

I think mostly by example.

um I know that if I would have said, you've got to go over to Cody for two weeks and do this job, uh let me know how it is when you get back, you know.

I don't think that would have worked.

uh But I went to the job sites with him in those early years for a long time.

I traveled to the job site, lived in a camper, lived in a motel, lived in an apartment, and I worked on the roof with the crew seven days a week.

And they staggered days off, so nobody else was working seven, but I was there working shoulder to shoulder with all of those guys.

And I think that that oh led the way for them to realize that, this is just what we do.

I didn't sit back and send them.

And later on, as I gathered some better managers, I tried to get off the roof more and more.

uh

I still spent a lot of time on those roofs, just shoulder to shoulder with those guys.

And I think especially in the earlier years, that was a very helpful thing.

I don't know that everybody would have done that lifestyle if I hadn't been there doing it with them.

How do you think your unique personality has shaped the business that you built and your leadership journey?

Well, I don't know that it's personality.

I think that the can-do spirit that my father instilled into me, we did everything.

I mean, we didn't have the money to hire anybody to do anything.

So we had to do everything we had to do, you know, and as I was a teenager and we moved up to Hemlock in Big Horn Estates, we were moving a trailer house up there.

He did hire a guy to pull it in, put it on the site, but we were going to level it.

Of course, we'd never set up a trailer house before.

And we started into it.

had a couple of bottleneck hydraulic jacks and a bunch of blocks of wood.

And this was a big trailer.

It was 14 by 70.

And it was dad and I and mom.

We were all out there leveling this trailer up.

Well.

We didn't know what we were doing.

We were figuring out as we went, like I say, the can-do spirit.

And at one point in time, we must not have done it right.

And that trailer started to fall off of the blocks we had it on.

And it did.

Everything came right down and the frame landed right on the ground.

Well, my dad was underneath that when it happened.

And so mom and I are standing out there just in total shock, not knowing.

what happened or how or what kind of shape he was in.

Well, he just started talking from under there.

He did get in between the two frames, so he had about a two-foot space in there that he was laying in, and he was between the girths, between them.

So he couldn't get out, he was just in that space, and he just started talking, telling us what we had to do.

You know, it never occurred to me to call for help, call 911, do anything.

mean, it was somewhat of a serious incident that just happened.

But he, from underneath there, directed me and me with mom's help.

You know, we dug holes in the ground, we put the jacks underneath it and brought it up a couple inches at a time.

And we were bringing up one end and I just did what he told me.

And we pretty soon had it high enough that, and solid enough that he was.

felt comfortable with crawling out the other end of it.

And so he did.

And then we finished the day out by continuing to do it.

But I mean that, you know, he had that, we're just going to do this.

We have to, you know.

And working right there again shoulder to shoulder with him, I kind of built that same spirit.

it's a nice thing to have to be able to, you know, just figure out that you're going to do it.

We've heard that from a few people that we've interviewed.

Often the people that become the most successful are those that didn't have any choice but to succeed.

There wasn't another option.

And it sounds like that's kind of the environment you grew up in.

Yes, it was.

There just was no choices in the matter.

You just had to do what was in front of you, and that's what everybody did.

And I still feel I do that today.

I get up and do whatever needs to be done, whatever's in front of me at the time, and I don't spend a lot of slack days in retirement yet.

Hopefully those days are coming.

I'm looking forward to doing a little bit more snowmobiling this year.

Hopefully I'll have a little more time away from work as well.

I am looking forward to that too.

Last few years it's been a little slow with snow and you being so busy and other snowmobiling buddies being busy.

We need to pick it up and this is the year.

Sounds good to me.

Was there something that significantly delayed the growth in building your business?

And if so, would you have handled it differently?

You know, um I don't think there was.

I didn't have growth on mind.

I didn't have a business background.

I didn't realize you needed to have a plan to grow.

Again, I just did what was in front of me every day, took one job after another.

And it did grow, but not because that was my plan.

I just was working hard and getting it done.

And as we moved on and started doing more prominent jobs,

When I would get a prominent job, I'd think, well, this is going to put us on the map.

This is going to get us going big time.

And we did that prominent job after prominent job after prominent job.

as I look back, they didn't make any corners.

They didn't put us on the map.

It didn't spur growth.

We just got them jobs done and moved on to the next one.

uh

My view of just working at it and enough, you know, as I started looking for financial plans and what was happening and talking to other business people, I think I took on a

view of what is enough.

I didn't take on a view of how big can we get.

I didn't set any growth goals.

I just worked hard at it and as long as things were working good, that was okay.

One of the things that Orval Ennis instilled into my brain was a concept about how to live your life.

He talked about people he knew that worked hard their entire life, never did anything, and as soon as they retired, they died with a lot of money.

And he explained to me how that was probably a mistake.

And then he talked about other people that he knew that spent every dime they had, and when they retired, they had nothing and lived forever.

So those were the two concepts.

uh

We talked about doing a happy medium, you know.

So I feel I took that to heart and we lived a good life as we went.

You know, we split things up.

We put money aside for retirement and we lived a good life.

And so we wouldn't be in either one of those positions.

Along with a lot of the other things he taught me, I greatly appreciated that.

you know, growth just happened.

It wasn't a plan.

It didn't have any...

big business ideas about him.

seems like that plan has worked fairly well.

I know you you sold the business to me and kind of went into semi retirement managing a rental portfolio at 54 years old Do you ever regret that decision or do you wish you would

have found a different balance than you did?

No, no, I try not to have uh a lot of regrets.

uh I have uh a slightly different word for it.

uh Instead of regretting something, I view it as you pay the consequence of a bad decision.

And that's a fine line and it's a gray area, but it puts the burden uh more on your shoulders to do better.

And that's just been my viewpoint.

I don't have a lot of regret along those lines.

Is there a lesson you've learned that you wish you would have learned earlier?

Yeah, I think so.

I think, you know, as I look back, hindsight, a lot of this stuff is hindsight.

I had no idea any of it was going on at the time.

I had a lot of good mentors that I didn't recognize were mentors.

And they were friends and I paid attention to them.

A lot of them had that lifestyle I admired.

And so I was paying attention, but I could have paid closer attention.

I'll back up and I've got to add a guy to this list.

When we were cleaning those bricks for this old man and his coveralls with his junky old truck, we were almost done with that building.

I don't know how many semi-loads of bricks we cleaned, but it was a lot.

He was going to take us to his house for lunch.

We got over there to his house and the first thing we noticed was he had an alarm on his door.

in the very early 70s.

And he had to get a key out, turn his alarm off, and both me and my friend are looking at each other like, huh, what's going on here?

You know, we'd never heard of anybody having a home alarm before, you know.

And we got into his kitchen and it was a, you know, we were not old enough to appreciate the home itself, but when he started to fix us lunch, he heated up some sandwiches in a

microwave.

Well, that was the first microwave we'd ever.

heard of or seen.

And so our eyes are opening up and we're looking around this house and after we eat, he wanted to show us his wife's uh collection of china.

And so we went downstairs and she had a collection of more china than I knew existed.

And it was a lot of it was gold plated and it was very valuable and his alarm system was even hooked up to the police department at the time.

And so uh this guy that we saw driving an old truck with his old coveralls that he worked hard every day to, um that was probably the first example of somebody I saw doing that

that did well for themselves.

And ever since then, we realized this was a wealthy man.

He might be in the salvage business, but that business treated him quite well.

So, you know, what business you're in or the public's view of that business.

I lost all that baggage trying to think about those things at that early age because I was so impressed with this guy in his old coveralls.

So I'll elaborate on that just a little bit more.

That was the first example.

But as I go on, you know, my dad, that guy, Norm Myers, Orville Lannis, Bob Edwards, all of these people

uh taught me a lot and I should have paid more attention.

But you know, this is supposed to be about inspiring other young people and so I feel like I should say that.

You you look around and find some people that have the life you want to have.

Hang out with them a little bit.

Learn what they do.

Pay attention to them.

And when those people tell you uh this is a good idea, well...

It probably is.

uh finding mentors, paying attention to them, and letting them lift you up is, I think, a great piece of advice.

And they're out there.

You just got to look for them.

Realize who they are.

That's great advice.

That's I think some of the best advice you ever gave me and something I've repeated a lot is to define people that are in life where you want to be and then watch what they do and

emulate it.

think people could move themselves forward in life a lot if they would do that more frequently.

We don't get the best advice when we hang out with people that are at the same point in life we're at.

That's correct, yes.

um You know, who you hang out with is important.

Hang out with somebody that's going to lift you up.

Is there a particular viewpoint or something that you've significantly changed your mind about throughout your time in business, leadership, and just life experience?

Is there ah maybe a viewpoint that you once held that you've now changed your mind about?

Yeah, I think there is.

uh As a self-employed person with uh employees and you're running the show and you're getting whatever level of success you're having, uh I think we all tend to think that

we're doing it the right way and everybody else isn't.

You can look at another contractor and say, well, they're struggling because of this, or you can say they're

They got quality issues because of that.

You tend to think that you're doing it the right way and you tend to criticize opposing viewpoints.

as time went on, I realized, you know, that's really not the case.

I had that uh problem uh pretty strong, pretty hard.

I spent a lot of time with other roofing contractors that might be out of the box too.

But on that board of directors, there's 32 of us and I spent six years there hanging out with those guys.

And you know what?

A lot of those gave me some advice too, but I was like, wait a minute, I'm doing good enough.

I don't know that that is.

And as I started trying to build field management, I realized that so long as those people were handling risk, know, roofing is a...

high-risk, high-profit business.

So the way to make that work is you have to minimize the high risk.

And so long as those field managers were minimizing that risk and were treating employees good and providing oh the quality that you expected out of them, that you could go ahead

and let them do it their way.

And so I tried to do that.

know, Sean and Billy Delozier from here in town, they ran my crews for

for quite a few years and I don't know that they would agree with this statement.

But it was them running the crew that opened my mind to that.

They were wholehearted uh in for the business.

They weren't these people who didn't care.

They did care and I needed to learn to turn them loose and although I learned that from them,

I might have been late in doing that, but as I retired and look around at other businesses and other people, uh I've lost that concept.

You have to look and have respect for the people that are doing other things that might be different than you.

And I see that problem, especially in contractors.

We're all taught to do it the way we do it or learned however we learn to do it.

we seem to think that that's the best way.

And there's a whole lot of ways to do that.

And turning people loose to do it their way and they can reap the benefits of that and be proud of what they're doing is better than keeping your thumb on them.

I also feel that was true.

I spent a little time in the search and rescue world and I think that happened there also.

But my viewpoint about that has changed a lot.

And not only has mine, I see that as a fault I had in early years.

uh I see that a lot of people have it.

getting over that is a very helpful situation.

That's something that Adam Weatherby had a lot to say about when I chatted with him recently is that it's easy to stand on the outside looking in and judge other leaders or

other businesses.

the more time you spend running a business and acting as a leader, you realize that

None of those positions are easy.

And anybody that is achieving success in business or in leadership has worked hard for it and has found something that works for them.

And so he said something very similar that the more time he spends in leadership and the more time he spends building his business, the less judgmental he becomes about others

doing similar.

Yeah, and I think that's in good words, less judgmental.

ah That's what it is.

you got to lose that and let people give them respect for what they're doing.

So.

You talked a little bit about building field managers.

um Can you help us understand the timeline a little bit better building your business?

It launched in 1985 and I know that you talked about a time where you would go get a job and then kind of put together the team, the crew to go do it and do the work.

And then when it was done, everybody else went home and you went about finding another job.

uh I know eventually

you kind of built that into a full-time job and then eventually brought in some field managers to help manage that business.

Can you help us understand the timeline and the process of growing from just you starting out to having a full thriving business that worked year-round with middle management and

full-time staff?

uh Well, I can tell you that it just evolved.

There was no plan uh looking forward into that.

Again, I had no business background, no business concepts.

I just went to work.

uh But we did.

We started out, we had uh not much for any trucking capability and we had to go get all of our material.

We weren't a big enough contractor to have our stuff delivered yet.

So we had to go get it.

So we had those kinds of challenges.

And then getting it on the roof.

We had no equipment at all to get anything on a roof.

And so we pulled it up with ropes, carried it up ladders, very dangerous, but that's what we did again.

We had no option.

We had to do what we had to do.

We had to get it up there.

and doing it right along with them, nobody, you know, we didn't view that as a problem.

We were just getting the roof done.

But as...

As things moved on and we got into bigger jobs and things were working differently, we got a lift, uh one that came hung off the roof and you had to pull it up with a rope.

And then we started renting some forklifts and then we started owning forklifts and we went from doing relatively small jobs to doing bigger jobs.

And it just happened, you know, we just kept growing and growing and growing.

And I kept looking at the bigger prominent job thinking that that was going to do something and it never did.

I think I stated that a few minutes ago, but you know, we did some very large jobs.

You know, we did the Casper Event Center, which I think is now called the Ford Center, one of the biggest buildings in Wyoming.

And we did the flat and the shingle part of it.

And we did the Sheridan High School, which was the first job we did over a million dollars.

So when I think about

carrying Rolls-Royce on the back alley of Main Street Buffalo to doing the event center and a million dollar project.

We just had a slow steady growth.

did not set out to say well in the next three years we're going to do this or we're going to buy one of those.

We just bought things as it was necessity and as time went on and I think we did enjoy

pretty good steady growth from the first year right on through to my last year.

I don't know that there was many dips if any in revenues, but we just let it happen.

Great.

Was there a major mistake that you wish you could have avoided?

Yes, there is.

And I didn't want to do this interview without mentioning it.

Early on, one of my other mentors was Jack Miller.

He was a very good, close, personal friend.

I met him in the bar when I was a bartender at the Crossroads.

I did a double duty there for a little while.

And he was an outdoorsman.

And we went on to hunt together.

And then through his contacts, I became a guide with him.

And he was at the time the best friend I'd ever had.

And he was working for me because as I said, construction was low.

He was a general contractor.

Construction was low at the time.

It was dead, not low, it was dead.

And I had a job out at the uranium mine and he was running that job for me.

I wasn't out there.

And he fell off that roof and was injured real bad.

He spent a couple weeks in the hospital and he was having a lot of operations.

it's right at the beginning, first week of hunting season, I was guiding.

And he was having his last surgery done and he passed away of a heart attack during the surgery.

And boy, if I could have that

Have you ever made a beneficial mistake?

uh A mistake that was a mistake at the time, but taught you a lesson that surpassed the consequences of the mistake.

Well, I think I had a lot of those.

uh I kind of developed what I call a continuing improvement situation where, you know, as things happen to us in business or in life, it's pretty easy to blame somebody else for

what happened to you.

And I don't see where that benefits anybody, uh especially not yourself.

So...

I tried to develop this concept to where you would take responsibility for everything that happened to you.

Not always was it your fault, but what could you have done to prevent it?

I suppose to kind of date myself a little bit, one of the examples was when fax machines became a thing in the construction business.

We would fax off orders to our supplier and we would get there to where they're supposed to be and they wouldn't be there.

So you'd call them up and say, well, I sent the fax.

And they would say, well, we didn't get it.

And that happened the next time.

And they would say, well, we got a fax, but we couldn't read it.

And it would have been really easy to have blamed them, say, well, if you can't read the fax, call me and find out.

And so I'm thinking, OK, this is a mistake that happens to us right along.

We have to take responsibility for it somehow.

come up with a concept to stop it from happening.

So that's what we did.

Whenever it was our company policy, whenever you sent any facts to anybody for any reason, you would then call them and say, did you get it?

And can you read it?

And that eliminated that mistake.

So uh that worked really well.

And we were able to stop all of those mistakes, even though they were somebody else's issue most times.

We were able to stop those from happening by taking ownership and figuring out a plan.

And I think we did the same thing with leaks.

You know, as a roofer, not every roof you put on is perfect.

Sometimes they leak.

So pretty early on, I came up with a plan to track leaks.

And so whenever we went on a leak call, when we got back, we would fill out a piece of paper.

You know, was it our roof?

Was it under warranty?

What was leaking?

How did you fix it?

And this didn't mean anything for quite a long while.

But after 10 years or so, there was a lot of information in there.

There was a lot of data.

Of course, it wasn't on a computer.

It was on pieces of paper.

So I went through all of that and made note of what they all were.

I kind of took tallies.

And there were several things that kept reoccurring.

And it wasn't that we had bad workmanship.

It wasn't necessarily a...

that type of an issue, but we were able to identify things that went wrong on roofs.

And so just as a, for instance, the verbiage might not be familiar to everybody, but a T-lap and membrane that kept reoccurring.

And so I decided we would take the step to put a patch on those T-joints every time, everywhere.

And we would already have them patched.

It would take very little extra effort while we were there, but

They quit leaking force, those went away.

Transition pastures did the same thing.

And Stephen Rhodes, another good friend, long-term business friend of mine out of uh Burke, our supplier that we used quite a bit, we were having dinner one night and I was

telling him about this.

he was at a precipice with his uh warranty situation in the...

uh

Roofing World, the one-upmanship of the warranties was a problem.

You know, well, we have tenure, okay, well, we're going to have 15, okay, we're going to have 20.

And this was going on at the time.

And he was contemplating going from 20 to 30 years.

And he listened intently to, he asked me about all of our reoccurring issues and listened intently.

And as he developed his 30-year warranty, he took my list of reoccurring issues.

and turned those into the requirements to jump from a 20 to a 30 year roof.

And so that's what happened.

He did that.

And I felt pretty good about that, our little pile of pieces of paper that everybody wrote down every time they fixed a leak.

But again, we would take ownership of that problem.

They were our leaks on our roofs and we would...

go take care of them, but we kept track of them and then tried to prevent them.

Some of them, once again, might not have been our fault, might have been a serviceman that dropped his screwdriver or dropped a razor blade and got stepped on.

Well, you would write that all down and pretty soon we would be coaching our customers about telling their servicemen that these are tough roofs, walk on them all you want, but

they're susceptible to sharps and you'd have to keep the sharps off of there.

And I think that that concept is a good concept for anybody in their lives.

can apply that to personal things.

uh Jokingly for a minute, you know, what makes your wife mad?

You keep doing something that makes her mad, maybe you could take responsibility and quit doing those things.

You know, you could blame her for being mad about it, but you can also...

Add some ownership and change some things and resolve those issues.

Just take ownership and take action instead of blaming somebody.

Blaming somebody else doesn't help.

uh trying to not repeat mistakes is a big thing in life, I think, and in business.

I think that's something huge that you install instilled in our company very early on that has carried over even to the current day with yet the third generation of owners is.

um

finding and fixing problems regardless of whose fault it is.

And if there's something you can do to prevent a problem, even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility to get in front of it and take care of it.

And we can improve our lives, improve our efficiency, improve our quality by fixing things, even if it's not necessarily our fault.

I think that's a legacy that you have left in our company that has served us well long after uh

you resign from a leadership position there.

That's good to know, yes.

If you were 25 again and had the goal of becoming self-employed, would you choose to go into the roofing business again?

Yeah, I don't think I would make any changes.

How could I?

I couldn't ask for a better uh end of the story.

No, I don't think I would change anything.

But I can tell you that over the years, uh one of the struggles in the roofing business is that nobody wants to buy a new roof, especially if you have a commercial building.

uh I go in there, you might spend $100,000 to stop your leaks, but it'll look better.

You don't have a new sign, you don't have a new paint job, you don't have a better

parking lot, you don't have more square foot, you know, nobody can tell.

And so nobody wants to spend money on a roof.

I always thought, you know, being a boat salesman or four wheeler salesman might be a really cool thing because everybody wants to come in, they want to buy your products, and

they're happy to give you their money.

Never the case in roofing.

Never the case.

So it was always a hard sell and you're always dealing with people, you know, with a decision in a time that

they would just as soon not be in.

So there was a downside that the salesmanship dealing with those people instead of happy people was uh somewhat of a challenge.

No, I wouldn't change.

I wouldn't change anything.

uh It's been a good ride.

Nothing has changed there.

I've made a similar joke many times and nobody ever calls me happy.

They're never in a good mood when they have to call their roofer.

You're always dealing with someone that has a problem and they might pay you for your services but they are never excited about it.

What was your biggest win as a leader?

Well, I think my most rewarding concept in leadership, I'm going to have to step out of the business and the roofing realm and step into the world of search and rescue.

I lived in that world for almost a parallel with my roofing career for 30 years.

And I was put into leadership role.

It wasn't necessarily my choice, but that's.

That's where my skill set worked pretty good.

And you know, in Search and Rescue, you help people lots of times on their worst of days, and you help a very large cross-segment of society.

know, uh people who get lost, sometimes they're kids of wealthy people, sometimes they're just hardworking regular folks, sometimes they're from out of town.

some, you know, just a great diversity, a cross-section of society.

Those people that you get the opportunity to help are just all so different from each other.

And then, uh yes, over the years, we've saved a few lives.

So um when you can provide some leadership to apply resources that give people the help they need on the worst day of their life and

to maybe even save their life.

uh That's a pretty rewarding thing to do.

uh And I enjoyed that work.

think uh most days I would have rather been out climbing one of the hills rather than in the command post, but uh I think that my skill set was better served uh in that leadership

role and directing all those resources rather than being one of them.

That was very rewarding, and I'm happy to have done that.

Since you brought up search and rescue, know that was a pretty significant portion of your life.

You spent a lot of time doing that over more than a 30 year career.

Did you see a lot of crossover in the leadership skills between search and rescue and the roofing business?

Yeah, I think so.

know, I don't know.

I don't know that I have a lot of advice in leadership.

uh I may have had some leadership roles, but I didn't set out to do that.

And I don't know that my advice is good.

But yes, uh leadership was leadership.

The construction business and the search and rescue world, uh managing those resources were uh very similar.

uh

You know, as I started going to seminars, learning, search and rescue, learning, search and rescue, management, and I've been to a few construction management seminars over the

years too, uh several things amazed me at how parallel they were.

And just as example, the span of control.

You know, any one person shouldn't be overseeing any more than five.

And I think that those parallels are

interesting and that people should take note of those.

know, I know that, you know, Jack Miller, he was in the uh union world back East before he moved to Wyoming, and they have strict rules about span of control for five people and uh

management companies in seminars for roofing, you know, the head of that company should only be overseeing five people and those people oversee everybody else.

And it's the chain of command that doesn't ever get broke.

And Search and Rescue does the exact same thing.

Your leadership team has your incident commander and five subordinates that deploy everything under your direction.

And that's not the only uh similar thing.

I think that management of people and resources is management of people and resources, whether you're in construction, Search and Rescue, or probably even retail or

manufacturer, any kind of a business.

uh

being a leader and being effective, think you could step into almost any environment and survive and do a good job if you get a good foundation.

your 30 years in search and rescue are there any particular incidents or yeah I guess incidents would be the right word that stick out in your mind as a big win or something

particularly interesting to have experienced.

Well, there's quite a few.

uh And the one that gets the most attention in Johnson County that our members performed was one for Black Tooth.

uh I don't know that this search gets a lot of attention and makes for good stories.

And so it's the one that always gets told.

But there's been a lot of kids saved and a lot of people found that

might deserve that space better.

I think that was the biggest search we've ever had.

A guy was going to take his girlfriend up to Black Tooth Reservoir, Black Tooth Peak, to ask her to get married.

He was going to propose.

And they got lost on the way up there.

And then she got hurt.

And he stayed there for a couple days.

And we were called in.

And back in those days, we called the surrounding counties quickly.

uh and we had a lot of other volunteers and before we knew it we had about 80 people in the field and we had uh an army uh helicopter running people back and forth and doing some

searches and they were you know we had a lot of assets going on and we were able to find her and oh we pulled her off the top of that peak as you know you were in the helicopter

Eric was lucky enough to, he had good timing that day.

Anyhow, he ended up in the helicopter and on the scene with probably six other guys, I think six, or was it total of six?

Five or six of them were up there on that peak.

And the helicopter came in right after dark and picked her off of that and left them all there.

And it made the...

the Good Morning America show a couple mornings later and got a lot of attention because he was proposing to his wife.

But it was a very large search and we used management team to oh keep good tracks of that.

And it just went well.

Nobody got hurt and we pulled it off.

you know, the saving a life thing is kind of tough to chalk one of those up.

You don't do that.

I never did that easily.

I always thought, all right, well, if we weren't there, who would have?

I mean, would they really have met their demise in that situation, or did we truly save their life?

And she was hurt, and she was in a bad spot, and it was a long ways from anywhere, and it was good, cold nights.

I don't know if that's one of those searches or not.

It could very well have been, we don't have very good crystal balls, but when I look back over the years some of the ones where the answer was yes.

uh Those probably deserve better attention, but don't make as good of stories.

It just went well.

Yeah.

I had excellent timing on that search.

think I was roofing, working out of town.

I had recently taken over the business from you and when we got the call to head out into the field, I was out of town and unavailable and couldn't make it.

so lots of people worked a lot harder than I did for many days trying to locate her.

And uh when we finally found out where she was at and we're sending the helicopter in to go get her, uh I got the call asking

if I had made it into town and if I was available, no one really expecting me to be there and I was just pulling into town as that happened.

So I was told that there's a black hawk waiting and I had 15 minutes to get on it and ah I got to be in on the exciting part of that search and I missed out on the three or four

days of hard work ahead of time.

Yeah, your timing was impeccable.

was a lot of people put in a lot of hours before that happened.

yeah, when that we needed a high angle person and you're a member of the high angle team and they were at the airport dropping people off and still sitting there idling and they

were needing one more high angle person.

And so I knew Eric was out of town, but I thought, well, I'll ring his phone and see.

And he said he was at the shop.

And so I said, well,

helicopters on the pad waiting for you just get up there and go and so he got a ride in.

Most of the other people walked in and then a few got rides in the helicopter but not very many and then of course the next morning the helicopter made an extra trip in and brought

out the people that were sitting on top of that peak they had spent a long night there.

I could go on for hours talking about that search but one of the

Another one of the funny aspects was uh Lane Qualm was in there also, uh Dennis Storson and a few others.

And anyway, uh Becky Qualm was down at the command post and when we learned they were going to go up there and pick her up and leave the guys there, she had the idea to send

pizza in with them.

And we were dropping uh sleeping bags and a bunch of other gear because although they were,

pretty well prepared in the field and they could have spent the night some more creature comforts was a good idea.

So we ordered some pizza and we sent it in.

And the helicopter came over and kicked out all the gear before picking her up.

And so after they got her onto the helicopter and gone and they went on packaging all of their new gear that was kicked out onto the floor, they found these.

pizzas that were stuffed in the sleeping bags.

So having pizza delivered to the Black Tooth Peak was quite a little uh good idea that Becky had and I know everybody appreciated that.

We should contact Pizza Hut.

I'm sure that sets some sort of a record.

had pizza delivered that was still warm at over 12,000 feet.

ah that was a welcome surprise that day.

And I think I was one of only two people that got a helicopter ride both in and out.

Everyone else, if they were lucky enough to get a ride either direction, they got a ride only one direction.

Yeah, yeah, everything just clicked on that.

It took a long time, a lot of people, a lot of effort.

It was a big search, but uh everything clicked well overall.

So over your 30 plus years leading a business and as a leader in search and rescue, are there any particular resources that have been important in your uh development as a person

and as a leader?

oh

Yeah, I think so and I think I kind of answered this question earlier but I'll touch base on it again.

uh Mentors, mentors, mentors and mentors are the thing to pay attention to.

When I look back at the wisdom of the people that taught me the lessons, they taught me that I had no idea I was learning at the time.

oh We really need to...

be mentors for people.

There's programs out there where you can volunteer to be a mentor.

You know, your nephews, your nieces, you know, find a way to communicate things to them.

It's the uh statement of that only if we had an older, wiser person to have told us those things.

Well, you do.

You just gotta listen.

So I know in 30 years in the construction industry, you mentioned that you dove into roofing with no knowledge of roofing, buying out a bankrupt business and started in the

construction industry in a time when construction was pretty dead.

uh

Having lived through some of them myself, I know there's been a few other hard years along the way.

ah What is it that kept you motivated and kept you pushing through those hard years and those hard times?

Well, I think I have a backwards answer to that.

oh Instead of worrying about how you push through the hard times, as I've already stated several times, you just did what was in front of you for the day.

And that was the hard times.

so you just, that's what you did.

And then you celebrated any easy times.

If you had a break in something, that's where you would take your time to enjoy what you had and...

what you had to do and the hardships just were there.

uh Being self-employed, running a business, running a crew, uh all of these things are somewhat hard.

If you don't have the entrepreneur spirit, uh it's probably not for you.

Not everybody has that.

You have to have drive.

You have to not expect things to go easy.

uh

You know, life is hard.

So you just trench forward with that and enjoy it when it's not.

I think that's the three rules of business, right?

It takes twice as long as you thought, it costs twice as much as you thought, and you are not the exception.

There you go.

Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

Was there a major turning point for you building the business when you felt like I finally made it or maybe when the business took a significant growth step that felt like it was

really turning a page to a new chapter?

Well, again, with hindsight, I might have a different view than I did as it was happening.

uh As it was happening, some of the prominent projects, like I stated before, uh seemed to be good turning points, seemed to be good things that were happening.

And as I said, in hindsight, they weren't.

It was no big deal.

We went down and did the, one of the ones I'm most proud of is we went and roofed the Barrett Building.

Now the Barrett building is part of the Capitol complex in Cheyenne and it houses the State Museum and the State Archives Department.

And uh I guess it makes sense that the people who run the museum and the archives, uh they're a little picky about what gets wet.

And so uh they did that under a performance-based bid and we were lucky enough to get it, but it left me with the design.

and installation of the roof over those facilities.

And that felt good.

It felt real good at the time.

But as years went by after that, nobody else cared about that.

You know, those big, what I thought was turning points weren't.

uh They were just another hard day's work.

uh I think that the day you took over the business, uh

was, or maybe the day you sold the business, was the turning point.

know, uh that coincided, you took over at the same time Kara started her career.

And so as a dad, it appeared as if both of my children were graduated from college and were gamefully employed and well on their way.

And I think that's the day that uh

I should feel that I've made it.

Okay.

Is there anybody that you'd like to see on the show?

Somebody that has a really interesting story, ah maybe a cool career track or works in a really interesting industry that might be fun to learn about?

Well, you know, I had thought, tried to think of somebody that would do that and, you know, there's a lot of local people that have worked hard and gained a level of success

and have done well for themselves and they would probably all have good, interesting stories.

So I don't know that I have much of a specific example but...

uh

One might be Bob Zimmercheid.

You know, he has owned several businesses.

He has lived in Buffalo for a long time.

He has had a lot of employees and uh his businesses were sometimes diverse and required a lot of changes.

And I think his story would probably have a lot of interesting twists in it if he were to sit down and tell it.

a great idea.

I'm gonna have to reach out to him see if he might be willing to join us.

So ah my favorite question that I ask every guest, ah are you a person of a particular faith tradition and if so how did that shape your leadership?

Well, yes, yes, I am, first of all.

And I got to start that over again.

Are you a person?

If so, how has that shaped your leadership journey?

Yes, I think faith has been a big piece of uh my thought process.

I told you the story earlier about Orval Ennis, who I thought was the best Christian I've ever met.

He influenced me in a way that I didn't know he was influencing me.

And when I look back on that, I'm very thankful for it.

His leadership and him passing on a lot of things, faith-based concepts that uh went right over my head.

I got the concept.

I didn't realize how faith-based it was.

I grew up in a Catholic world.

I have awards for catechism.

We went to church very regularly when we were close to a uh Catholic church anywhere near the Air Force base.

That was kind of a basis there for me, but Orville is the one that had kind of turned my...

my viewpoint, once my eyes were open to what he had done.

You know, one day we're walking down the road downtown Buffalo and a guy coming at us, he looked up and saw us and he quickly turned and went across the street.

And I knew who he was and I knew why he did that.

He had owed me some money and he wasn't paying it.

But I didn't react to him or that at all.

And Orville asked me, he said,

Why did that guy just do that?

And I said, what do mean?

He said, why did he just walk across the street?

And I said, well, he owes me some money and he doesn't want to see or visit with me, so that would be why.

And he never missed a beat.

He said, Dave, you have to live your life so that you never have to do that.

He said, don't go there.

And that stuck.

I still remember that.

And that's probably one of...

Fifty things he taught me that way.

And so I try to do that myself.

I'm not a very outspoken evangelist type person.

In the construction world all of your uh people are not very open-minded always.

They're kind of maybe some rough people.

In fact, it wasn't very long ago I was running a crew in Gillette.

the biggest part of that crew was people at the halfway house.

So they were all on their way out of prison.

I wouldn't call many of them active Christians by any means.

uh And I knew that they could use some guidance and some help, but I also knew that if you ever mentioned any words about faith or anything like that, that it would turn them off

big time.

So I never did.

But as we ran into uh situations, one guy was not treating the company or me very well.

And I handled it in a way that I tried to keep him going and treated him fairly and well.

some of the guys came up to me afterwards, after everybody witnessed our discussion.

And so why do you give him such a good break like that?

Why?

Why isn't he fired?

We would expect to be fired if we did that.

And I said, well, we're supposed to treat everybody as we want to be treated, aren't we?

And I said, that's the way I'd want to be treated.

And that's all I said.

And so I think that ah in my mind, I'm planting seeds by doing such things to a group that is not necessarily very receptive.

And do I know that any of those seeds took root?

I don't.

uh But I'd like to think so.

That's a great answer.

I know uh you've talked about a few interesting projects.

ah You mentioned the Barrett Building and the Event Center that's now the Ford Center.

Are there other really interesting projects that you could tell us a little bit about and why they were so significant or so interesting?

Well, I got a pretty good list of those, uh you know, interesting ones.

uh I went over and worked in Nevada on a high-security state prison over there.

And while that opened my eyes, we were going on all of the roofs with inside these prison boundaries and uh one half of it was one type of offender and the other half was another.

And uh like I said, it was high-security state prison.

wasn't a...

County lockup.

These guys were in there for a long time, a lot of them dangerous, and we had to from building to building right in their yard out there.

Wow, I saw things there that I had no idea what happened in prisons, and we had a guy that was supposed to be helping us that was a prisoner, and I was a little concerned about

that.

They said, this guy gets out in three weeks, he's not going to do anything.

I thought, oh, okay.

I can live with that.

But anyhow, he was afraid of everything because he knew that if he goofed up at all in those three weeks that he wouldn't be getting out.

But that was an interesting job for sure.

And we did one up Montana in 1992 that

you are doing or you just completed again, that roof had never leaked.

They re-roofed it because it had lasted so long they didn't think it could last much longer.

So uh the architect called Eric and I and wanted my input from how we did it the first time and we went up there and helped him redesign that roof and Eric was lucky enough to

get that bid.

and he just re-roofed it for the second time.

And it's a very unique building.

Those of you from Wyoming going up the buildings once in a while, it's the one with all the humps that sits under the airport.

Very challenging building.

Just getting from one hump to the other was very difficult.

You had to have ladders, ropes, you had to have something.

You could just not walk across this roof.

And we had to tear it off.

uh

built up roof.

So we took tons and tons and tons of stuff across those humps.

And it was challenging and it was an interesting project and it was one of those ones that put us on the map and provided the big corner for us that didn't really materialize.

But in my mind it did.

We went out of state and all of the out of state projects, know, for things that

provide memories, know, can, anybody can give a low bid on a project and get a project.

But when you do private negotiated work, and for me it was even traveling work, when people would contact me and want me to travel across the country to go do their roof

because of the quality they received on their roofs here or that they had heard about, uh that was rewarding.

And we went to seven different states.

uh including Florida and California and several in between.

And we went to those projects because those people wanted our level of service, our level of workmanship.

And that's a little different level of reward than getting the low bid.

uh Even on a big, wonderful job like the Sheridan High School, my only million dollar job.

um That was great, but we got it by having the smallest number.

So uh those negotiated jobs turned out to be more rewarding for me than the low bid ones.

Awesome.

Well, thank you very much for joining us today.

This has been a special episode for me.

This is something I've been looking forward to and the idea of interviewing you and getting to tell your story really was the birth of this show.

I know we really focused on the construction side of things, but maybe on another day we'll have to have you come back and chat a little bit more about search and rescue and ah

some of your experiences there as well.

So thanks for joining us.

you're very welcome.

And I enjoy talking search and rescue.

So yes, I would entertain that concept for sure.

And thank you guys for joining us here on from the ground up show if you want to be part of a future show either as a featured guest or if you have a question to ask of one of our

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