Licensed GC 69753| I assist business owners and privately held companies design & build their facilities throughout NC and share what I learn along the way.
Raleigh, NC
Joined May 2013
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I’ve been in the commercial construction business for a short 15 years. In that time I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons that have shaped how I operate today. Here are my principles and things I wish I would’ve figured out sooner:
• Your business is fueled by relationships. Period. Never forget it.
• The job is about helping people and the community. Prioritize this and the rest will take care of itself.
• When you screw up, own it and fix it quickly. Notice no “if” here. It’s gonna happen.
• Business Development is an organizational responsibility, not one person’s or department’s. Great marketing and sales can win you a lot of business, but poor execution will make sure you don’t get anymore.
• Construction is a team sport, impossible to do alone. Find great partners and treat them like partners.
• Don’t skimp on making the job site a great work environment. It’s where the money is made.
• Treat your subs and vendors as resources and partners. These relationships are just as important as your client relationships.
• Before you take on a client / project, make sure their values align with yours. Don’t take projects just because the numbers look good.
A lot of these principles apply to any business. They’re also common sense to most, but require lots of discipline to stick to.
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Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
Wise words from Ben:
"I actually don't think live like you are dying is very helpful advice. Live like you are living. Live like you got your whole life in front of you, and just be your strongest, healthiest, and best self.
Everything that I have told you is just more and more confirmed to me. Try to take over the world.
Try to accomplish everything that you can in this life. Use your strength to its greatest ends that you can.
Everyone dies. Rich people, wealthy people. Julius Caesar's dead. Alexander the Great is dead. Achilles is dead. My grandpa is dead.
It's not that romantic. I'm not that special because I'm dying. It's actually one of the most common, unremarkable facts of life,
I have a family that I love very much. I have four wonderful children and a tremendously supportive wife.
I have found my vocation in life, my calling. I have loved being a podcaster and speaking to all of you and sharing what I have learned. And so I would just say, don't let death catch you unprepared."
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Ben caught a raw deal: He’s a good guy. Please help in any way you can: medicine, donations, introductions, or helping spread the word:
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
“We have a lack of founders in big businesses. Founders care about their people, they care about their customers, they care, care, care.”
I don’t engage or post much on @X or social media in general. One of my goals this year is to change that. I think this gesture by @rainmakerspod is a sign. Thank you sir for sharing the knowledge. I’ll be sure to pay it forward.
@FoundersPodcast
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Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
🚨FRIEDBERG: "60% of middle class household's net worth is in their home. Only 10% is in owning the S&P 500, index funds, whatever in their retirement accounts.
By creating this American dream around housing and allowing the Federal government to provide loans on housing, we've increased the cost of housing and created a destructive housing bubble that reduced people's exposure to participation in productive value creation like the ownership of businesses.
Instead, we've stored our net worth in a house and in order to keep the economy and the social structure stable, we've created policies that allowed the continuation of the growth in the value of houses so people feel that their net worth is incrementing, and that's unfortunately very unnatural."
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
A month has passed since Bob Kierlin's death. Though he built Fastenal into a $44B market cap giant, he remained an unknown titan of industry—exactly as he preferred.
Kierlin's true legacy lies in his approach to company culture. He was one of the few CEOs who genuinely meant it when speaking about employee empowerment. In his book "The Power of Fastenal People," he emphasized that organizations are simply people uniting for a common purpose, with success coming when everyone aligns toward the same goal.
When Kierlin debuted the book in 1999 to share the lessons he learned as CEO, it did not sell out. Rather than continuing to publish it commercially, he stopped selling it altogether and instead turned it into a handbook distributed to Fastenal employees to help them understand the company's unique culture.
What these pages don't reveal, however, is Kierlin's remarkable generosity—a quality that made him not just respected, but beloved as a leader.
After Fastenal's 1987 IPO, instead of buying a house or a car, he established a charity with his co-founders to fund schools in his hometown of Winona—an act he never mentioned in his book, revealed only through thankful editorials in local papers.
To honor his legacy, I'm giving away 10 copies of his book. To enter, simply follow me, retweet this post, and send me a direct message or email [email protected].
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
The New Atlantis: We Don’t Need This Much Permitting thenewatlantis.com/publicati… via @tnajournal
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
Also, the California High Speed Rail pictured on the left cost taxpayers $100 Billion
In contrast, SpaceX spent $5B-$10B to develop Starship, less than 1/10th the cost of our non-existent HSR
At this point, I think most government spending is really just looting
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
The problem with Biden’s original unrealized capital gains tax proposal is that it promotes holding illiquid, less fluctuating assets, and punishes investing in or building new ideas that eventually go public and help grow economy, create jobs, and create wealth for others. There are also many impracticalities of any proposal for taxing unrealized gains: insider trading laws that would make it hard to sell the stock to pay for the tax, the administrative nightmare since valuations change constantly, and the fact that the government would effectively force you to sell an asset well before it is desirable.
Whether we like it or not, taxes incentivize or disincentivize behaviors across the economy, and an unrealized gains tax discourages the very engine that makes America the #1 economy in the world.
There are still plenty of ways to raise tax revenue that would *not* hurt the economy, like taxing personal loans that are taken with stock as collateral, improving estate or inheritance taxes, updating deduction rules, and many more.
Harris has the opportunity to move away from Biden’s tax plan, while still bringing in more tax revenue, and doing so in a more fair and practical way.
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
I remain uninterested in misleading people about construction costs. I don't lowball to win work, then upcharge later.
And I remain uninterested in working with clients who want to be told tales rather than be told the truth.
Integrity and honesty is the way - on all sides.
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
What You Don’t Understand About Building:
• It is way harder than you think.
• Orchestrating subcontractors is chaos.
• Supply chain issues are real and will bite you if you don’t plan way in advance.
Shout out to our friends at @phoenixcommprop for having me and giving me the opportunity to discuss our approach to commercial design-build!
Check out our latest podcast! Pick up some tips on the design build process! Thank you @DesignBuildNC and Focus Design Builders, LLC ! lnkd.in/gVAh7tSJ
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Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
In 1998, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged.
They hired legendary designer Paula Scher to create a new logo.
In their first meeting, on a napkin, Scher drew what became the iconic Citi logo.
As Scher got up to leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked,
How can it be that it’s done in a second?
“It’s done in a second and 34 years," Scher replied. “It’s done in a second [and] every experience and everything that’s in my head.”
Takeaway 1:
As Scher has become a master of her craft, she's experienced an interesting problem.
"A lot of clients like to buy process," she explains. "they think they're not getting their money's worth [if] you solve the problem too fast."
This is known as the "Labor Perception Bias."
It's an interesting phenomenon: we are generally impatient, yet, we are skeptical if, for instance, we're at a fancy restaurant and the food comes out only minutes after we ordered.
One of famous examples of the Labor Perception Bias is the parable of the engineer and the hammer:
A factory owner hired an engineer to fix a broken-down engine. The engineer inspected the engine for one minute, took out his hammer, hammered the engine once, and then started the engine with no problem.
The engineer charged the factory owner $5000. The factory owner was shocked, protested that the engineer had worked for only one minute, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer sent the factory owner an itemized bill:
Hammering the engine: $5
Knowing where to hammer the engine: $4,995
Takeaway 2:
On my desk, there is a notecard that says, “All success is a lagging indicator.”
The line comes from one of my favorite Ryan Holiday articles. “When a day’s writing goes well,” he writes, “it’s a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking… Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator of a lot of preparation.”
Knowing where to hammer the engine is a lagging indicator of the years and years working with hammers and on engines.
And Paula Scher’s ability to create an iconic logo in a second is a lagging indicator of 34 years spent honing her craft.
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“When you sit down to create something...what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” — Tinker Hatfield
Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!
Jonathan Williams 🏗 retweeted
According to the CDC, construction occupations have the highest rate of suicide as well as the highest number of suicides across all occupational groups. Address suicide prevention as a health and safety priority by pledging to STAND Up for Suicide Prevention ➤
Tip for getting pricing from trade partners:
Take the plans and go meet with them in person. They get hundreds of emails a day just like you. It allows you to work through the scope together plus build on your relationship. Face to face is always better. Your client will thank you for it.
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Just submitted our site plan to a local municipality. Staff level review, no rezoning. Project is for a local business owner. We will now meet to discuss the site plan with municipal staff before they will begin reviewing it. Just got the invite for that meeting. Number of people attending not including our team: 45
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