This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “Building wealth and freedom into a visionary business plan,” a cover story published in the May 2018 issue of B-Tank Magazine. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
George Hedley is not a storytelling man. He will tell you that he grew up in Long Beach, California. He will let you know that the desire to build and run his own business came from his father, a mobile home parks developer. And he will reveal that he got a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Southern California in civil structural engineering. But as an award-winning business coach and the owner of a $50 million-a-year construction business, he is reluctant to draw a straight line between his personal story and his business success. “It doesn’t matter where you came from,” he says. “With professional guidance, you can grow your construction business and make it profitable.”
The story Hedley prefers telling might be called, “Stop Mismanaging Your Time and Invest in Yourself.” He tells that story in his books, online video courses, speaking engagements and personal coaching sessions — all of which grew out of his initial construction business.
“The hard part is creating a company that lets you do more than just pay your bills,” he says. “You want a higher goal that lets you construct a life of freedom and wealth so you can live the way you want.”
More easily said than done, and Hedley is the first to admit that. Shortly after he graduated from USC, he took a job at Bechtel, the San Francisco-based construction company whose projects include the Hoover Dam, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and many other large-scale infrastructure projects. The company was prestigious, and Hedley’s future as a global civil engineer lay spread out before him like an interstate highway. “It all sounded good on paper,” he says. “But I didn’t like sitting behind a desk all day. I was itching to build something.”
After a year, Hedley left Bechtel and took a succession of jobs as a contractor with construction firms and real estate companies. Bingo. He found work he loved. By twenty-seven he believed he had the background and self-confidence to strike out on his own.
“I had two thousand dollars in the bank, my wife was pregnant, we had just bought our first house and I quit my job,” Hedley says with a wink. “What better time to to start my own company!”
Building onto the future
Hedley leveraged the many contacts he had made in construction and real estate and started his own construction business.
To his chagrin, he discovered that he was still working for other people.
“My first client was a wealthy California woman married to a big-time engineering guy,” Hedley recalls. “I did supervision, project management, estimating, clean-up. You name it. I did it. I was making a thousand, two thousand dollars a month. I wasn’t broke, but I was working all the time. I had no time for much of anything else. And I wasn’t getting wealthy.”
Hedley says he could have continued down this path, eventually grossing two or three million dollars a year.
“I was exactly like so many of the guys I coach today,” he says. “They get stuck at around three, four, five million dollars in sales. Sure, you can pay yourself a nice salary, get a bigger truck, a bigger house — but you are what I call ‘busy and broke.’ And that’s the norm.”
The turning point for Hedley came when he acknowledged a glaring hole in his operations. He had no business model.
“To run a real company, you have to have structure and formal systems in place,” Hedley says. “If you want to succeed, you need to hire good people to manage your business for you. Your job is not to be a manager. It’s to be a visionary leader.”
A visionary in the construction industry? What does that mean?
Hedley says it means being strategic, not tactical.
“When you’re small, you do everything yourself,” he says. “You hammer in the nails yourself. You go to the lumberyard and buy plywood yourself. Once you get rolling, though, you have got to hire people to get the work done. Your job is to exude confidence. And you can only do that by looking far out onto the horizon and inventing the future you want out there.”
First, Hedley says, aspiring business people — in every industry — need to understand their numbers.
“What do your materials cost?” Hedley begins. “There’s no room for guessing here. Cost overruns — out of the question. Late job — unacceptable. If you estimate a job at a million dollars, it has to come in at a million dollars. Period. The end. That’s how you build a company people want to deal with.”
Hedley emphasizes that numbers are the tactical side of a business. The strategic — and aspirational — part of business involves a focus on customer service.
Hedley makes a distinction between a repeat customer and a loyal one. A repeat customer, he argues, hires you because you are a low bid. A loyal customer gives you their project because of your reputation.
“You create a reputation based on how you treat your customers. You spend time with them. You take them to the baseball game. The football game. You take them to lunch. I call it ‘date your customer.’”
The point is to avoid customers who hire you because you’re cheap. “That kind of work is easy to get,” Hedley says. “Lower your price and you’ll get as much work as you want. Problem is, you’ll end up on the no-money treadmill. That’s hard to get off of. You’ve got to stop doing the cheap work and negotiate from a position of confidence.”
A brand people never forget
Hedley also has endeared himself to his customers by branding his construction company as “Hardhat Builders.” Later in his career, he carried the same branding over to his coaching business (Hardhat Biz Coach), his public speaking engagements (Hardhat Presentations) and his online video courses (Hardhat Biz School).
“I started out with a big H,” Hedley says. “I had a four-by-eight piece of plywood and I put a big orange H on it along with my company name. I’m in Orange County, California, so I had to go with orange. You could drive down the freeway and see the big H and know it was me.”
Hedley’s customers told him that they saw his signs everywhere.
“I heard it all the time: ’You guys are big!’ Well, that’s how I wanted to look. I didn’t want to look like some dinky little guy you don’t want to hire.”
Hedley’s signage eventually included his iconic orange hard hat.
“My employees and I all wore orange ties. Our shirts were orange. The company trucks were orange. I didn’t care if people didn’t remember my name. When they needed a builder, they called the guy with the orange hardhat.”
Effective branding was not enough for this visionary.
“I understood that a downturn in the economy could drive a spike through the construction industry,” Hedley says. “To secure the wealth and freedom that were my dearest goals, I needed something that would generate a check whether I was pounding a nail into the wall or courting a new customer. That’s why I began looking for real estate investment opportunities in my twenties, at the very dawn of my career. My construction business gave me the opportunity to build wealth. I never looked at it as an end in and of itself.”
For his first real estate investment, Hedley bought a duplex, fixed it up, sold it, bought a new one and continued the cycle. Once he got the hang of buying and selling these small units, he moved on to industrial commercial buildings. Because of the great financial outlay involved in the latter, he often forged partnerships with friends or bankers.
“My goal was to invest or co-invest in one property a year, so that by the time I was fifty, I would own twenty or so properties,” he says.
Indeed, when Hedley hit fifty, he owned or co-owned a half million square feet of commercial property.
“To this day, my investments are all still spitting out passive income,” he says.
Hedley stopped building in 2010 when he was sixty years old.
“I didn’t need to build anything anymore,” he says. “I had plenty of money coming in from real estate.”
Getting into give-back mode
His retirement notwithstanding, Hedley still suffered from a kind of spiritual “Attention Deficit Disorder,” as Hedley terms his restless personality.
“I realized in my fifties that I wanted a fulfilled life with significance, something in addition to amassing real estate, and something other than building commercial properties,” he says.
Through his church he offered financial counseling for married couples.
“But I’m not a psychologist,” he says. “I’m good at it, but I don’t have the gift for counseling that, say, my pastor has. That’s when I made the decision to start speaking at construction conferences and help contractors get out of the ‘busy but broke’ mentality.”
At conferences such as Flooring Plus, Custom Home and Minnesota Green Expo; at companies such as 3M, Chevron and Marriott International; and at trade associations such as Steel Tube Institute of North America and Self Storage Association — among many others — Hedley began telling an array of consultants what he had learned in thirty years as a builder: Anybody with entrepreneurial dreams can succeed if they have a plan in place.
“At the heart of the matter is a willingness to admit that you weren’t born knowing how to run a business,” he says. “Number one, you’ve got to make a commitment for personal development. If you’re not willing to grow yourself, your company’s never going to get where it needs to be. Even if somebody handed you a million dollars, what would you do with it? You’d spend it and three years later you’re broke again.”
Hedley encouraged his conference attendees to seek the services of a professional business coach, either in person, through books or in training sessions. Only a coach can keep you focused on the dual prize of wealth and freedom, he says.
“Let me put it another way,” he says. “If I’m the head coach of a football team, and I’m out there all day on the field, running the plays, do you think the team is going to win? Absolutely not. You need coaches, training, playbook and scorecards for everybody out on the field. Your job is just to motivate the players and make them excited about winning the game.”
Two decades after Microsoft founder Bill Gates famously declared that content is king, Hedley channeled his own content into two books — Get Your Business to Work! and Get Your Construction Business to Always Make a Profit! — as well as four online courses under the rubric of Hardhat BizSchool.
Now sixty-eight, Hedley cannot slow down. He and his wife of forty-plus years spent three weeks earlier this year playing golf in Scotland.
“This is why I’m in business,” he says. “It’s so I can take time off and spend time with my family and friends. Every business person has to ask, “Why am I in business? What do I want my business to do for me now and down the road?”
Those are the million-dollar questions, Hedley says. The answers are worth every penny of a great business coach’s advice.
