hen I was ten years old, I was drivin’ a truck on the farm. I was bailing hay, I was stacking hay, running a few errands and taking care of the cows and hogs. At twelve years old, I butchered calves. I had the responsibility to clean up the meat house at ten o’clock at night. I still had to attend school, but once I got out of school, we had chores, we had to work.

If we strung a fence around a 50 acre field then everybody was out there doing it. I’m talking the whole family. We ate together; we played together. And when we had work to do, everything went smoother because we worked as a team. We were that close. When you’re brought up workin’, that kind of sews it in you and you continue that the rest of your life.

And now when I develop a team, we have the same values. We work together, we eat and we spend a lot of time together. In order to be a team, you have to bring everything out on the table, be open with each other. We have to be able to look out for each other. We have to be able to give more than we receive.

If you can’t trust the person that you’re working for, you can’t be happy. But if you trust that person you work for and you know that he’s working with you and cares about you, you’ll put in a hard day’s work and you’ll feel better about yourself. You know, really and truly, how can you work for a person that you can’t trust? He’s there to protect you. He’s looking out for your interests.

Now I take my children to Atlanta and point to the buildings that I have built. I think that has a lot to do with what I do too. Because it’s the pride of sayin’ “You see that right there? I helped build that.” That’s something that I’ve done. It’s actually evidence of your life, you’ve done something with your life. You know it’s there.

Stories from the Field