The Construction Mindset

The first lesson I got on a construction site was about my hands.

I was fourteen, sitting in the warehouse at six-something in the morning waiting for the seven o'clock start. Hands in my pockets, just taking it in, listening to grown men tell stories I couldn't relate to yet. One of the managers walked past me and stopped. Looked at me and said, "You must not be ready to work."

I said yeah, I'm ready to work.

He said, "You can't be ready to work with your hands in your pocket. That's the fastest way to get fired."

I'd never heard that before. Nobody in school teaches you that. Nobody in the neighborhood teaches you that. I learned it standing in a warehouse before my first ever shift.

That was EL Plumbing and Mechanical. My father's company. By the time I worked there, he was already the big boss. I didn't grow up watching him do the day-to-day. I grew up watching him build a business. The first version of it was in our basement. Blueprints on the table. Crayons. A little office. My sister and me played down there when we were small. I'd pretend I was working. I'd pretend I could read the drawings. I'd trace the city maps he had pinned up and find my neighborhood on them like I was scouting territory. Sometimes we weren't allowed downstairs. Pops had work to do.

By the end of the 90s the business was in a building, and I started going with him. He'd talk about what he was going to do with it. As a kid you hear the words. You don't see the vision. The thing I remember from those visits is the orange soap. The citrus scrub the guys used to get the oil off their hands. I'd go to the bathroom on purpose just to play with it because it smelled like oranges.

Then I got old enough to work, and the warehouse became my classroom.

The guys called me a bag of muscle. Sweep, load tools into the tool crib, unload trucks, load trucks, run inventory. Eight or nine dollars an hour, every Wednesday. I learned to sweep one big square at a time until I worked my way through. I learned about the powder you put on the floor to soak up oil. I'd played in that powder as a kid and didn't know what it did. Now I had to sweep it up.

The real education was in the men.

Cliff was the one who put me on. One day he asked me if I wanted to make a couple extra dollars. I never turned down money. He told me if I got my chauffeur's license I could drive the stake truck and pull two more dollars an hour. I went home, figured it out, came back with it, and started running deliveries. There was no GPS back then. Cliff would pull out a piece of paper and draw the route. Hit this McDonald's, go left. See that gas station, go right. That's how I learned the city. That's also when I learned what those mile markers and exit numbers on the freeway actually were. Not random. A system. I dropped material at the airport. I dropped material at the MGM Casino while they were still building it, before the parking lot was even in. Watched it go up from the side of the building.

Rick was the superintendent. Cool, laid-back, liked to fish, didn't ride any extra. He showed me you can be good at the work and still be a man you'd want to drink a beer with. Scott was like Stone Cold Steve Austin on a construction site. Bad-ass truck, the way he drank his beer, born for it. He'd come to a project and tear it up. Good at what he did and he didn't care how you felt about him.

And then there was Bill.

Bill came in around 2008 when the company shifted and became EL Mechanical. I was in my twenties by then. Different element of the industry. New crew. Less benefit to being the owner's son and more pressure with it. People thought everything got handed to me, so I had to prove myself harder. My pops mostly stayed out of it and let me figure it out. Nuggets between shifts when he had time.

Bill liked to be in control. Bill didn't see me as one of his guys. He wasn't going to give me real project work, period. So I learned to set fires. Not real fires. I'd let a problem on the floor build up until it caught upper management's attention, and the VP would walk in and tell Bill we've got to put this out. Bill would be working on something he didn't want to give up. He'd hand it to me. By the time the work was done, nobody knew who set the fire. They just knew there was one, and they knew it got handled.

Bill also taught me how grown men in business actually move. There was a safety guy on a job who got tired of Bill being on too much. I tried to warn him. I told him there's a way you have to deal with Bill. He said something like, I don't care, he doesn't control me. One day Bill walked into the trailer and asked him why he wasn't on the job site. The safety guy cocked his head sideways and said, "What did you say to me." Bill backed down on the spot. Said sorry. Walked out. The safety guy looked at me like he'd won.

I knew he hadn't.

Bill didn't fight. Bill maneuvered. A few weeks later, every email the safety guy sent, Bill replied-all with the spelling errors marked. Every memo got picked apart. Bill brought things to the other project managers' attention quietly, in a way they could agree with. Within a month the safety guy was gone. Bill saved the company money by sharing a safety guy across two contracts after that. Smart business.

I was the only kid in the room watching that play out, and I was filing it. How to protect your emotions. How to read who's actually in control of a room versus who thinks they are.

My pops would coach me after the fact. I'd come home heated about something Bill said or did. He'd say, "Son, you can't respond like that. Son, you can't do it that way." Sometimes I'd push back. Tell him it sounded like he was protecting them more than me. He'd say no. One moment you're on top, next moment you're not, and you have to know how to move in either one. He was preparing me for the industry. Nothing was given. You had to earn it. Cutthroat business top to bottom.

I left construction in 2014. I thought I'd left it behind.

In December 2021, fifteen years after I first walked into Tennessee State and walked out, I crossed a stage at Wayne State with a B.S. in Construction Management. I skipped the internship requirement because I'd already done the work. The basement with my pops' blueprints. The maps. The warehouse. The orange soap. Cliff drawing routes on paper. Bill in a trailer. All of it counted.

I run rooms today that don't look anything like a construction site. Nonprofit events. AI workshops. Board rooms. Conference tables. The code is the same.

The trade taught me how to work.

My father taught me how to think.

Both of them taught me how to keep my face still.