I Didn’t See All the Danger Signs

Introduction:

This week, Mel Gravely—the newest addition to our podcast team—tells Shawn Busse and William Vanderbloemen how he bought a Cincinnati construction business in 2005 even though the company wasn’t doing well, even though he knew nothing about construction, and even though the company had been shopped to everyone who did know construction. As you’ve probably guessed, things worked out just fine for Mel, who is now focused on putting a plan in place that’s designed to keep Triversity Construction in business for 100 years. That goal, Mel explains, can mean taking some counterintuitive steps, including not always maximizing profit and not planning to stay in the CEO job as long as he might have preferred. Plus: we learn why the construction industry is unlikely to be an early adopter when it comes to AI. And William tells us how he did this year on his mission to make himself less essential to his own business.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Mel Gravely is CEO of Triversity Construction.

William Vanderbloemen is founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Shawn, William, and especially Mel Gravely. Mel, you’ve been on Dashboard before, but this is your first appearance on the 21 Hats mainstage, and it’s really great to have you here.

Mel Gravely:
I’m excited to be with you guys.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, in case there’s someone out there who hasn’t memorized every 21 Hats podcast episode, can you tell us a little about Triversity Construction? How big is it? What kind of work do you do?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, we are a Cincinnati-based commercial contractor. We’ve got about 105-110 people. We’ll do about $120 million in construction volume this year. We service large private customers who are buying construction all the time. About 40 percent of our business is health care, or maybe a little bit more than that in some years. We were founded in 2005, and we self-perform some of the interior trades, drywall, ceilings, floors. How about that?

Loren Feldman:
That’s good. How’s this year been for you?

Mel Gravely:
I would call it steady. We’ll exceed the plan. From a profit standpoint, we’ll miss our revenue target. We can talk more about why that is, but mainly because of the capacity of our team. We just ran out of gas to say yes to more work. I would say getting back to normal disruptions in supply chain, which we think are going to be the future. Normal in pricing. So, in general, those are the norms of our industry, and so we’ve settled in to execute against those norms.

Loren Feldman:
When you talk about the capacity of your team and the impact that’s had on revenue, is that a labor-shortage issue you’re talking about?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I would probably call it “picky Mel.” [Laughter] We probably could have hired to meet our revenue targets. But we’re betting on a long-term play here, and what we keep talking about at our executive level is: Let’s hire people that if they were on the bench with nothing to do, we’d be fine with it, because they’re that talented. And when you set the bar that high…

You know, we don’t hire for projects. So we’re hiring steady. But we want people who are going to be here a long time, Loren, and sometimes hiring for projects doesn’t get you there. So yes, shortage, it is tight. But this is structural. So this is not an economic reality for construction. This is construction. Construction labor market is tight. It will always be tight. And productivity gains are the only way to get us there.

Shawn Busse:
Hey, Mel, so you used the term self-perform. Maybe you can talk about the difference between a contractor who does self-performance and those who don’t—and also why you chose to go that route.

Mel Gravely:
Thanks for making me clarify that, Shawn. So the difference is most general contractors or construction managers—which is a lot of how we deliver our services to our customers—own the risk of the outcomes of the project. But they’re subcontracting everything to plumbers, electricians, drywallers, asphalt people, roofers. They’re managing that process, but the work is actually being done by subcontractors.

We do subcontract a great deal. But we also self-perform, and that’s the term when you are doing the actual work—people wearing tool belts, cutting drywall, putting in ceiling, ripping out floors, and putting it back. That’s the self-performance part. So we do sub, still, a lot of our work, but we self-perform a growing piece of our work.

Your second part of your question is intriguing. We didn’t start out self-performing work. We actually bought this company in 2013, and they were a drywall contractor at the time. And the reason is twofold: Number one, a little bit of vertical integration. So I get a little more margin from the self-performance, and I can self-perform my own work. The second reason, though, is it gave us control of the edges of projects.

So sometimes you get into a project, and there’s stuff in between what the drywaller does and the electrician does, and you need somebody to fill that gap. Well, if you don’t have anyone who has a tool belt on and a truck and some tools, you sometimes are fighting and trying to figure out who’s going to fill that gap. It gives us more control around the edges of our projects, to just have people be able to come in and fill some of those gaps.

Shawn Busse:
So the little random stuff that crops up, the stuff that maybe doesn’t fit real nicely, in terms of a scope of work for a subcontractor.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, like you go into a hospital—again, we do a lot of work—and you need to set up a containment wall, so you separate the work from the patients. That containment wall is a bit of a pain in the butt. Someone’s got to put it up, someone’s got to maintain it, someone’s got to make sure you’ve got negative airflow. And our folks can pop that stuff up for us, and we can go in and then do the work.

So things like that, that our folks can show up and take care of, just gives us more control. And if we get behind, our folks can paint. So if the painter gets a little behind, we can supplement the painter. Even if we subcontract, we can supplement the drywall. We can supplement the demo person, if we have to. So it just gives us a lot more flexibility around the edges.

Shawn Busse:
So the consequence of that is now you have a fixed cost, in terms of workforce, which is, a lot of these contractors try to protect themselves by basically not carrying any fixed costs other than the owner and maybe a small administrative crew. So you’ve found that the advantages of this offset the risks that you take on?

Mel Gravely:
Well, let me start with the answer: Yes, there’s no doubt. I mean, our ability to deliver a differentiated value to our customers is pretty high because of our self-perform capability. But also, we did two things with our interiors business: One, we kept it small, so it’s still a pretty small organization. They’ll do about $6.5-7 million this year.

The second thing we did, though, is they competitively bid work in an open market. So they’re competing against other interiors companies for work with some of our competitors. So they’ll bid work to our competitors and go out and be a subcontractor to them. And being able to balance that allows them to run their business from a complete P&L standpoint. So they do some of their work with us, some of their work with other contractors. And we found that that balance, if we can keep it a balance, works pretty well.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, I think you said that you’re hitting your profit goals for the year, but not your revenue goals. How have you managed to do that?

Mel Gravely:
Well, first, I think we’re pretty conservative planners. So, as my board would say, we sandbag a bit. So there’s a little bit of that in there. But also, our drywall business, which is our higher margin business, is far exceeding their plan. And going back to the value of having them, there have been years that they didn’t far exceed their plan. But this year, they’re far exceeding their plan, which is adding a disproportionate amount of income to our bottom line. And, listen, the business that we have, although it’s below what our projections were, is good, profitable business. And it’s given us an opportunity to have a pretty good year.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, you and I met at a Tugboat event. I believe you’re the first regular on this podcast who belongs to the group, which believes in building businesses to last 100 years. Part of the idea is not selling to private equity or other investors. By the way, I think this is a group that would be of interest to both William and Shawn, if they don’t already know about it. I’m curious, what has that concept of building a business to last 100 years meant to you, and why are you part of the group?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And yeah, I’d love to share it with William and Shawn anytime they show any interest at all.

Loren Feldman:
Right now!

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, Mel, I’d love for you to sell that to me. I looked at Tugboat. I get their journal. I think it’s a great idea. For me, it comes down to: love the concept, but don’t have the time to get to the events. And then the money becomes a question as well. So sell Tugboat to me.

Mel Gravely:
I would agree with you. Let’s start with that. If you can’t make the events, I agree with you, the value diminishes to just not enough, in my mind, for the cost. But let me tell you why it’s been a transformational organization for me personally, and I believe, over time, for our organization.

It helped me clarify and find the words to articulate what my vision was for this organization. So it helped me with that. And there ae so many different ownership models, scale models. How do you vertically integrate models? How do you deal with employee issues? So there are so many models and things to learn, but all of the people there are subscribing to the same set of core business principles around people and profit and longevity and evergreen. So you’ve got this commonality with all this difference. And so the models that I’m seeing… I mean, it’s just an incredible opportunity for me to learn and grow as a leader.

And to get very practical, there are times in our organization where I can maximize profitability and I choose not to. Because my horizon is so long that it allows me to say, “No, we don’t need to optimize tha.t”. Because this is more important, because we’re trying to not just accumulate profitability. We’re trying to accumulate culture and the power that goes with that. We’re trying to accumulate management talent that can take things from one generation to the next. So the intentionality around the decisions around succession, and decisions around ownership structure, and decisions around investments and horizon are just terrific.

In this group, you’ve got Edward Jones, which is huge, and you’ve got companies that are $10 million or $5 million even—I think they get that small—so everything in between. You’ve got ESOPs, and you’ve got family-owned, and you’ve got partner-owned. So no matter what you’re trying to solve for, you can find it in the group. The last thing I’ll tell you is, I’ve never been around CEOs, and none of them are beating their chests. None of them are blowing smoke up your skirt about how great life is for them. None of them are holding back information. If you want to know it, you can ask them. They’ll share it with you under a code of silence. I’ve just never experienced this openness.

Loren Feldman:
We have the same thing here, by the way, Mel, except for the code of silence part. [Laughter]

Mel Gravely:
So I just think it’s been a great group for me. The president of our company, Jim Watkins, is joining now. He’s attended one event. My team goes to a team event they do in February. We went last year. We’ll go again this year. So I’m exposing them to it at the next level. And it’s not cheap, guys, and I’m not a guy who spends money like that—except on clothes. So it’s that valuable to me. So, William, that’s what I would say, buddy.

And here’s the problem with Tugboat if it’s got a problem. And I don’t know how they can fix it. It is hard to articulate the value without going to an event. So no matter what they write, no matter what they send you, it is just hard to articulate the value—unless you’ve been to an event. And once you’ve been to one—and it only takes one—I think you either connect with it or you realize: This is just not for me.

William Vanderbloemen:
That makes sense.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us an example of a decision you made differently, because you have that 100-year horizon in mind?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I’ll give you a great example. So if you gotta be around for 100 years, you’ve got to do a bunch of things right. But one of them is, you’ve got to have strong, smooth succession. You’ve got to be able to go from one management team, one leader, to the next. So three or four other Tugboat companies got together. They all had presidents and CEOs in some phase of going through transition. And to be able to model and benchmark and discuss, “How did you do it? What are you planning? How are you working on it?”

So the president here and I are going through a similar transition that we’ve been working on for two years. But we’ve been working on it with the insight and input of others who are a bit ahead of us, some behind, but some way ahead of us that they finished their transition already. And so just that alone, and the things that we planned in, and the development that we’ve sent the president through to get him ready, and the way we brought along our board of directors—and we do have a fiduciary board of directors. The way we brought them on and the way we’re positioning the executive leadership team for the transition.

And even to how we’re PRing this, our plan for PR as we make the announcement. All intentional, and they’re informed by our affiliation with this group. And I would have never thought about any of that, to be honest with you. I mean, the details of transition are very, very important. But if you don’t get that right, you’re not going to be around for 100 years.

Loren Feldman:
How far along are you, Mel? Is the plan in place?

Mel Gravely:
The plan is in place. It’s got dates on it. So I’ll say we’re in the red zone, if I can use a football analogy.

William Vanderbloemen:
Mel, I’m interested. We do quite a bit of succession planning for our clients. Your transition is moving you out of your current role, I’m assuming?

Mel Gravely:
Correct, it will be moving the president into a president/CEO role, and me out of a role. I’ll continue to be the chairman of the board. And I’m the primary shareholder, too. But I’ll also move to a role we’re calling an executive chair, which we gave its own job description. It will not be a day-to-day job. I won’t have an office in the facility, for a number of reasons, but the title is executive chair.

William Vanderbloemen:
How did that process start? What was the first domino to get pushed over?

Mel Gravely:
My recognition that I wanted to demonstrate orderly management transition. That was the first domino.

William Vanderbloemen:
That’s awesome.

Mel Gravely:
I’ve gotta be honest with you guys—I feel like I’m in a counseling session—but I’ve got the best job I’ve ever had. Like, this is a really cool job. We’ve got a really cool company. I’ve got a great executive leadership team. And I’d kind of like to stay in the seat for a little while longer. But the truth is, I came to realize that, based on my limitations and the needs of the business, that it’s time for me to take that step. And I think—I don’t think, I’m sure—it totally helped me realize that reality. So the first domino, though, was my realization we had to make that transition. And so we began to process from there.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, yeah, I’m convinced that success in succession begins and ends with the outgoing person. And so that just backs up what I’m thinking. Well, it does.

Mel Gravely:
I agree with you. I agree. And that’s one of the reasons I won’t have an office. So, you know, some of the people we’ve modeled and benchmarked against the outgoing person at an office. And I’ve got a big personality. I’m very outgoing. I’ve got an opinion on everything. I won’t be able to not be me. And so I’ve got to not be in the building. And I just have to know that about myself. But we learned that by watching some others. And like, ooh, that’s just not going to work. Either the team is ready, or they’re not. If they’re not, then you’ve got work to do on the succession. But if they’re ready, then get the hell out of the way.

Loren Feldman:
You’re making me nervous, Mel. Are you going to be okay with this?

Mel Gravely:
I’ll let you know when it happens. [Laughter] Here’s the truth: I think I am, because I’ve had time. So you know, succession is not just preparing the next person. It’s preparing you, too. And I’ve talked to these folks who have already stepped out of their role about what it’s going to be like and what to expect. And the biggest thing is that no one calls you for your opinion. And we’ve all gotten addicted to that.

So I’m really preparing myself emotionally for that. I think people are gonna say I retired, and some people fight that. I’m not retired, but I’m not gonna fight that. Whatever you want to call it, you know? But yeah, I’ve been working on myself, too, Loren. So it’s a great question. I think I’ll be okay.

Loren Feldman:
William, you’ve talked to us in the past about how each year, you’ve been taking more time away from the business, sort of to prepare the business for a transition eventually. Did you follow through with that this year as well?

William Vanderbloemen:
I did. I’m actually somewhere in the midst of the five stages of grief that summer’s over right now. So we started by going away—so I’m not there, present in the office, as Mel says—which I think is critical. And then we started spreading it, you know, one more week a year for the last… I don’t know, six or seven years or so.

My annual review with my board is—Loren’s heard this before—one question, and it’s pass/fail. The question is: Did you make yourself less essential to the growth and running of the firm? That’s my one task every year, to make myself less essential. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that.

I’m learning a little bit more each year. This year and last year were the first two years that we’ve seen growth while I’m not involved. We’ve seen it run itself. It might be my ego, which is way too big, but I think we could probably grow faster if I were more involved. But that doesn’t get me a 100-year outcome. That doesn’t make this sustainable. And at the end of the day, when I do decide whatever trigger I want to pull with succession—right now, I want to have all the options open, whether that’s hand it off to a CEO, do an ESOP, sell, just be chair of the board, just be a passive-income owner. I want all those options available. So that’s the one question.

This year we were gone—well, we’ll be gone about half of September, kind of in and out—but we were fully detached for about two months. And that went well. And I say fully detached. I had a 30-minute call once a week with my COO to resource her in any way I could. But that’s about it.

Loren Feldman:
What got you thinking about the 100-year goal? Where did you get that thought?

William Vanderbloemen:
I’ve watched succession in our clients, particularly among clients where they’re founders. And if it’s a company where the founder has done a great job and grown the company, it’s pretty rare for the succession to go well. And so things turn into one-generation companies, and I just don’t want that. I feel too deeply about the work that we’re doing.

And I don’t need to be the lid. I don’t need to run it. I don’t even want it named after me. But as you all have heard before, the Google people told me we had to use my name, because it’s that messed up. And you can misspell it in Google 100 different ways and still get there. But I think it’s watching other people spend their life building something great and then it just dying. And I’d really rather that not happen.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, is this making you think about anything?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, Mel, I’m really encouraged to hear about your journey. And I’ve also heard really good things about Tugboat. I think they’re doing something smart, too. I was noticing they have kind of a $5 million annual revenue threshold, as sort of the entrance point. Because I think at that point, you have a company that’s self-sustaining.

That’s the journey I’m on, too. I mean, for a long time, our business development was largely me being on stage talking to groups of people, and creating interest in our company. That doesn’t work if you want to leave the company, ever. So building that ecosystem that doesn’t rely on me is really first and foremost. I’ve gotten out of doing the work a long time ago, but getting out of the marketing and business development side of it is a big challenge.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I agree. My brand around town is pretty well-known and pretty engaged. And that was the fear. And William’s point about, when he stepped away a little bit, that at first, it didn’t grow—I experienced the same thing. And I’ve not tried a couple of months, but for the last few years, I’ve taken a full month off—another idea from a Tugboat guy—but zero contact. Like, zero: no check-ins, no emails, nothing. Zero contact. And what I found is, they can keep the wheels running on it.

And what I worry about—worried about, I don’t worry anymore—is: How were we on culture? How were we on those decisions that really had to focus long-term? How were we on growing the business? And what’s happened over the last two years is, I’ve been convinced now that this team can actually grow the business. I think they can grow geographically. They’ve looked at some acquisitions that they brought to me pretty darn cooked already. I just love that. And we’ve got a management cadence of strategic planning, annual planning, and then day-to-day management that allows for it to be a bit of a routine. But I get it, guys. This transition is tough, which is why people don’t do it.

Shawn Busse:
I’m curious, you do a good job of getting out there. You’ve got a strong personality. You’re a compelling figure. How have you handed over the business development? And I’m not talking, like, closing deals that are coming in the door. I’m talking generating new interest.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, well, first, part of our business model is to be in the community. So if you’re an executive on our team, you’re in the community giving. And so, you’re on boards, which generates relationships, and so forth. So, as I’m getting this team ready, they’re growing in their own breadth of relationships. So that’s part of it.

As an example, the president of our company now, Jim Watkins, came to Cincinnati a decade ago. We recruited him here, but next year he will be the chairman of the board of our chamber. And in our city, that’s a pretty big deal. But it’s because he came in and had to get immediately engaged, because that’s what we do here as a means of making us relevant in the community, and therefore, relevant from a relationship to business development.

And then we’ve got a business development engine that supports that. So relationships are helpful. But then someone’s got to bird dog opportunity, differentiate in the market, blah, blah, blah. So we’ve got a department of folks who are driving toward this development effort once relationships open the door. And the last thing I’ll say is—and this is a discipline that’s been hard for me—I just say no, and I ask, “Is it okay if I send someone else?” And many times, I want to go, or I want to be on that board, or I want to be on that commission. Or I want to be the face. And I try, try, try hard to say no, and let someone else on the executive team step into that spot.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, I recently highlighted a story in the Morning Report about the many ways artificial intelligence is being put to use in the construction industry to try to make it more efficient. I’m curious, are you seeing examples of that? Are you playing around with it?

Mel Gravely:
The short answer is no, we’re not playing around with it. I do think it’s going to make an impact around the edges. But the challenge with our industry and innovation is this magical thing that happens on “bid day.” And on bid day, here’s how our business works. If we win a project, we’re the general contractor. We will have all of the subcontractors bid to us. And we’re gonna take the lowest bid, because the specs are the same, and everybody we talk to is competitive. And so they have to figure out the cheapest way to do something. Because on bid day, I’m not evaluating the best way to do something. I’m evaluating the cheapest way to do something. Innovation is almost never initially cheap.

So we don’t buy out buildings as a building; we buy them out as sub parts. So we optimize the individual parts on price. And we deliver a project that, I would argue, it may not be the cheapest. But it may have been the cheapest we could build. But if we’d have put it as a system, it might have been different.

So, Loren, the reason I think we’re slow in our industry on innovation, in the actual building of a building, is because of bid day. It’s the way we buy out projects. If we start to buy them differently and buy them as systems, I think you can find innovation in prefabrication: taking rooms and building them in a manufacturing environment and shipping them to the site.

There are a lot of people playing around with that. But it’s never cheaper on bid day. It is safer, it is faster, it is cleaner, it is less waste, it is all of those things. But very few people do it because it’s not cheaper on bid day. So right now, we still hammer nails the same way we did. Generally we use a gun, but the operation is the same. There’s a striker in there, and it drives the nail in.

Shawn Busse:
Well, you started out this podcast episode, Mel, talking about: What does a contractor do? A contractor owns risk.

Mel Gravely:
Yep.

Shawn Busse:
And if you are in a business where your primary function is to diminish risk, you’re on absolute opposite ends of the spectrum from innovation.

Mel Gravely:
Absolutely.

Shawn Busse:
The entire industry is, this is their fundamental problem. This is why construction is like the oldest industry out there, but it’s like the slowest to change.

Mel Gravely:
You hit it on the head. The word new is met with a no. If you lead with new, then the answer is no.

Loren Feldman:
That’s what William always says about churches. [Laughter]

William Vanderbloemen:
Yep, yep, yep. And you know, in our sector, I see this all the time. I’ve made this mistake. As a leader, how do you get something done? You ask a busy person, right? So a mistake I’ve made over the years, I made it this year. It wasn’t a huge mistake, but it was a repeated mistake.

I got a great person who, for lack of a better way of saying it, is bent toward quality control. Or as I think I hear Shawn saying, managing risk. So I put them in charge of developing a new product line. Well, that was a terrible thing to do to them. They’re frustrated. They’re trying to get it absolutely perfect, which is not the way to get a new product started. You get it good enough to ship and then you move on. But I have to keep reminding myself that people who are good at quality control, by definition, are not good at innovation—and probably the flip side, too. So I don’t know if you guys have experienced that or not.

Mel Gravely:
There’s no doubt. Absolutely. I totally agree. I mean getting a new product out, like you say, you’ve got to accept: That’s good enough. And some people just can’t. They just can’t.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, the premise of that article on AI was that there are tremendous inefficiencies in construction. And it talked about the sequence of subcontractors and managing that appropriately. It talked about making use of a worksite properly, because parts of it may be sitting there with nobody doing anything when somebody could be doing something. And those were the opportunities that were envisioned, I think, for AI. Was the article right about those inefficiencies?

Mel Gravely:
The article was right about what they said. The question is: Are those true inefficiencies? So I don’t know the answer. For example, if 42 percent—I think that was the percentage—of the site is not being used by anyone, is that an inefficiency? I don’t know the answer to the question. Because the sequencing of the job is not just about who can I fit on the site who could be working. The sequence goes some by inspection, because I can’t finish the drywall until someone comes in to see how I’ve done my electrical and my plumbing.

And some of the sequencing has to do with those things, Loren. So I think it’s an oversimplification. But there’s no doubt, if I have a better sense of what’s going on where, I can learn—that’s the AI part—to make better decisions. Or it can direct me to better decisions on deploying labor. Still, I will say to you, if I buy it the way I buy today, it’s just going to be hard to change subcontractors’ behavior, because you’ve stuck them to a price. So they’re going to work on that thing the way they want to work on it. You’re gonna be hard-pressed to get them to change their way.

Shawn Busse:
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this, Mel. You talked about how you do self-performing work. Okay, we’ve got our own team that can do stuff. And then it creates efficiency by having guys around who can do little things here and there. It seems like the industry has moved away from self-performance, and that it’s moved largely toward professional management groups, and then wide swaths of subcontractors.

And my observation doing residential construction has been that sequencing problem, and then having third parties who are not really accountable to the success of the project. They’re only accountable to getting the part done. It’s massively inefficient. And it seems like the industry is just trending in that direction further and further. Is that fair?

Mel Gravely:
Definitely fair. And listen, who wants the headache of fielding a team of construction professionals? It’s very difficult right now to get people who are skilled. So I get it. I think we’ve got some international opportunities there, if we figure out our border issues that may help us in that.

But I totally agree with you. It’s horribly inefficient. And it’s built to be that way. That’s the scary part. It’s built to be that way. But if we can figure it out, I do believe AI can give us an insight. But we’ve got to change. We can’t optimize on pieces and parts anymore. We’ve got to look at the system. And I think AI can help us do that for sure.

Loren Feldman:
William, you mentioned that this is the first time you’ve been away from the business, and it’s grown while you’ve been away. Why do you think that happened?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I’ve got, I think, the best team I’ve ever had. I’m about to lose one of the pretty big cogs in that wheel. But I think that was a big part of it.

Loren Feldman:
Not somebody from your vomit list, William?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, yeah. It’s all good. She’s wonderful. She’s 25 and on our lead team, I mean, just an unbelievable, remarkable young woman. And her husband got a big promotion. And they’re getting to move where they wanted to move. And she’s going to go into more of a calling-driven thing that’s a much, much lower salary. I knew we wouldn’t keep her. So it’s not a surprise, but not fun. But I would say she was a piece of us growing.

I have a hope—and I might be wrong—but what I started was a brand new idea for churches. And churches don’t like new ideas. And it’s since grown to churches, schools, nonprofits, and values-driven businesses. But I think either we’ve gotten some brand recognition we didn’t have before, or my hunch is, the pandemic was the great accelerator. It accelerated so many trends. And I’m hoping that our new idea, and the adoption of our new idea, got accelerated by the pandemic and The Great Resignation and so forth. So I’m hoping we’re hitting a tipping point where this is a flywheel that’s turning on its own. It’s not dependent on any particular personality. But I’d be remiss not to mention how good the team has been this year.

Loren Feldman:
You had told us a while back that you were planning on taking a more proactive approach to sales this year. Is that part of what happened?

William Vanderbloemen:
I think so. I mean, we have done almost no cold calling. And historically, we’ve done none. We’re starting to do some now, and seeing that get more traction than it ever has—which is not a big statement. But I continue to think that the biggest lid to our growth right now is not adding more salespeople. And we’re addressing that. But that’s a good problem for me to have. I’ve not been in that spot before.

Mel Gravely:
So when you say, maybe this is a flywheel effect, coming out of the pandemic accelerated some things? Did you mean an increasing clarity around values-driven companies or people looking to work in value or following their values in work? Is that what you were saying?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say, at least 50 percent of our work is for churches. And we are the first to market and, I hope, the best in the market. I think we are, at least at the moment. But the church adopting executive search as a common best practice, I thought that’d be about a 20-year process. And I’m not overblowing that. I really thought it would take 20 years. We’ve seen more and more churches just assume they need to call a search firm now than ever before.

And I think we got an acceleration from the pandemic. The pandemic made the church do different things. Digital giving went through the roof. It was already happening. It was getting adopted, but now it is the way you do things. Online church: That had been happening for years, but it was for those fancy newfangled churches, not our church. Well, the pandemic forced my mother’s church that’s 250 years old and lovely, but not innovative, to start doing online. So it forced a sector that doesn’t do change into change. And I’m hoping that that means that what I thought was a 20-year run toward normalcy has been shortened quite a bit. Does that make sense?

Mel Gravely:
So much so. Can I go back to what you said before? When you said you were out for a few months and you checked in once a week, I wanted to ask, what does that 30-minute meeting a week look like? Does it have a standard approach to it?

William Vanderbloemen:
I have a list. Jen has a list. We flip a coin to see who goes first. And it’s very small things. Sometimes, it’s, “William, there’s nothing to do here. I just want you to be aware that this person is leaving. And we have a plan, and here’s how we’re doing it.” When Krista, our all-star 25-year-old, left, “William, you’re not gonna like this. You may want a trash can.” I’m like, “Ughhhh.” She said, “Yeah, but I have a plan. And here’s what we’re going to do.”

So sometimes it’s a bring me up to date. If it’s a please weigh in on this, it’s either something brand new that we’ve not seen before, or something that’s very broken. There’s not a lack of wisdom on Jen’s part. It’s just, “William probably wants to weigh in on this.” And then my list is usually expansionist ideas that, while I’m gone and not in the day-to-day, I can actually start looking out over the horizon and thinking about new things. So it’s usually pretty quick.

Loren Feldman:
We only have a couple of minutes left. Mel, I just wanted to go back to one thing with you. You made a reference to when Triversity Construction was started. I think you said 2005, is that right?

Mel Gravely:
Correct. I was not here then.

Loren Feldman:
That was my question. You were not involved?

Mel Gravely:
I was not involved. I bought it in 2009.

Loren Feldman:
Could you tell us a little bit about your path? How did you end up CEO and largest shareholder?

Mel Gravely:
It was a going concern that was struggling. And one of the three partners, one who kind of pulled this party together—was not working out with the other two and wanted me to buy them out after they had shopped it to everyone on the planet. No one wanted to touch this thing. Because I don’t have a construction background, I didn’t see all the danger signs, so I bought them out. So that’s the short answer to it. I bought them out, and went on a search to find an operator, because I didn’t know construction, and about a year later found the gentleman who’s now president. Long story short, that’s how I got here.

Loren Feldman:
What gave you the nerve to buy a construction business when you didn’t know anything about construction, and the people who did weren’t interested in buying it?

Mel Gravely:
Well, I didn’t know he had shopped it to everyone until after. [Laughter] But this business checked all the boxes in what I wanted to do. It was a time in my life when I wanted to go prove some of the theories I had espoused as an author and as a consultant. It had an opportunity to grow to scale and be a model for the kind of diverse and inclusive organization that I thought would be that kind of model. It had a great partner, the one partner who was going to stay in the deal, and it had one customer. They’re still a customer today, and that’s Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

And I say this, and I mean it: If you can’t grow a business with an amazing high quality customer like Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and a partner like Messer Construction, you just don’t know what you’re doing. And so, I knew I could bring business development to it. I knew I could bring strategic planning to it. I knew I could bring culture to the team. So it’s really not that hard to find some people who know what they’re doing in construction and align it with your values and run it as hard as you can.

Loren Feldman:
All right, my thanks to Sean Busse and William Vanderbloemen, and especially to Mel Gravely for joining us for the first time today—and to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at Greatgame.com. Thanks, everybody.