It’s 3:00 a.m.; did the plumber remember to lock the Petersons’back basement door? It’s 3:25; the Johnsons are late on that last payment—is there enough cash on hand to make payroll? It’s 3:45 and raining hard; did a tarp blow off somewhere? If you are in the business of building custom homes, you are no stranger to such thoughts at such hours. Every small-business owner shoulders a ton of responsibility, but custom builders carry theirs across an especially high wire. And in the wee, cruel hours of the morning, the burden seems bigger and the wire higher. We asked a handful of builders if they sometimes lose sleep worrying about their business, and if so what their most frequent worries are. Their stories offer a glimpse of what really gets under a builder’s skin—and perhaps a bit of consolation. The next time you find yourself lying awake fretting about your business, you’ll know at least that you have plenty of company.
“Everybody does it in this business,” says Long Island, N.Y., custom builder Arthur Trifari. “You said you’d have a client in by such-and-such a date,” then a subcontractor fails to show up “and you see the whole thing sliding away.” The pressure of booking new work also preys on Trifari’s mind. He runs a small operation, so he needs only one or two projects to run at full capacity, but a couple of losing bids can bring him to a dead standstill. Toward the end of a project he sometimes wonders, “Is new work going to come? Is this the last job I’ll ever do?” In the light of day he brushes off such worries—“They come,” he says, “in the nick of time”—but insomnia casts the matter in a grim light. Rainy nights can be tough, too. Many of Trifari’s projects are on the shore, where Atlantic storms can play havoc with a half-finished building. “If it’s raining hard and blowing I always wake up, because I just know that something bad is happening on one of my jobsites. Something is leaking.” With other pre-dawn worries, Trifari can roll over and tell himself there is nothing to be done until morning, but not when it comes to water. Rather than toss and turn, he sometimes just starts the day early. “It’s 3:30 in the morning, and I know I’m not going to get back to sleep. I’m getting in my truck and going out to the jobsite.” When his mind turns to money troubles, on the other hand, there is no option but to lie in bed and stew. “Do you have enough to keep the project going?” Trifari asks. “Toward the end, are you going to make money?”
Finances haunt the waking nightmares of all the builders we spoke with, but not to the extent that one might expect. “I always worry about money,” says Ellsworth, Wis., custom builder Dave Wallin. But with careful management, Wallin has been able to push such worries to the background. “Basically I don’t have a lot of cash laid out that’s owed to me,” Wallin says. “We bill monthly, so I’m never more than a month behind. And I pay my insurance premiums, my workman’s comp.” Wallin frets more about his daily to-do list: “Making sure that everyone has the information they need, worrying that I missed someone along the way.” Preparing bids can also stir up nagging doubts “that everything that needs to be done was in the original proposal. It’s easy to miss something.” Running a tidy shop helps, Wallin says. “We’ve kept it very simple.” But occasionally, even the most confident tightrope walker can’t help but look down. “Every once in a while it occurs to me the risk I’m taking—really pretty high for the rewards I’m making.”
James Chenney, a custom builder in San Anselmo, Calif., knows the feeling. Chenney has no children and lives alone, but as a business owner he says, “I’m responsible for probably 35 families.” Many of his workers support relatives back in Mexico, so the ripple effect of his actions reaches people he will never even meet. That makes a major concern out of “just feeding that machine, just keeping the ship afloat.” Every employer faces something like what Chenney describes. But in building, he notes, “all of these issues are feast or famine. When the economy is up, it’s ‘How am I going to get enough guys?’ Then, when the economy goes flat: ‘What am I going to do with all these guys?’” And while grappling with such weighty matters, Chenney must maintain a light touch with clients, and with the architects who are the source of much of his business. “I’m worrying about keeping both the homeowner and the architect happy, and often that really stretches my diplomatic tools.” Chenney promised to finish one recent project by Christmas, but late delivery of detail drawings delayed progress. “The architect hasn’t been able to keep up his end, and the last time I produced a flow chart it showed completion in February.” Fireworks ensued, and the builder had to stand his ground without alienating the architect. “You’ve got to take a lot of heat,” says Chenney, who, like all of us, finds himself mentally replaying such scenes when he would be better off resting up for the next round. A couple of hours of perspective, though, can work wonders. “It always looks bleaker at 3:00 a.m.,” Chenney says. “When the sun comes out I think, ‘I can deal with this.’”
A more permanent antidote may be finding others to do the tossing and turning for you. Andy Beck, a custom builder in Vail, Colo., has logged plenty of sleepless hours in the course of his 30 years in business. “I used to have that problem a lot,” he says. “We jokingly refer to that around here as ‘building at night.’” But over the years, Beck has grown a substantial company, delegating what were once his own duties to others. In doing so, he finds he has also delegated the preoccupations that go along with them. “I would guess that if you talked with some of my guys they’d each have a different list of worries,” he says. “The superintendents worry, ‘Are the cabinets going to show up on time?’” Peace of mind for the boss comes from spreading responsibility among enough of the right people, Beck says. “It comes down to having enough horsepower.” These days, much of Beck’s energy goes into strategic planning, big-picture thinking that produces less anxiety than, say, managing subcontractors. His day-to-day responsibilities center on sales and customer service. “If I lose sleep at all,” he says, “it’s about preparing a winning proposal.”
But perhaps as effective as growth in quelling Beck’s early-morning angst is the gradual accumulation of experience. “How do you deal with a client who is objecting to the way you’ve charged them?” Beck asks. “They’ve busted their allowance by 50 percent or 100 percent,” and now it’s up to you to make them understand that it’s their fault, not yours. Custom builders will always face such thorny problems, but as Beck has learned, each problem addressed and solved can lessen the sting of the next. “When you’ve become seasoned,” he says, “you don’t worry about these things.” At least, not as much as you once did. But no amount of growth, experience, or success will completely tame the job of custom building. Beck says he sleeps at night because he has grown to accept, and even relish, the wild side of the business. “I’ve learned to love the beast.”
