There’s a hammer hanging in the lobby with a piece of PVC and duct tape where the handle should be. “We could not afford a new hammer.”

Chris Coghlan sits down with Ben Burgess, P.E., founder of Burgess Civil, who started in June 2014 with a tiny bit of working capital, five men hired off Craigslist, and one rented office behind a real estate receptionist he asked to pretend she worked for him. Twelve years later: Burgess Civil employs roughly 200 people, has about $100 million in backlog, $130 million in DOT bonding capacity, and the site package on the USF football stadium. Ben didn’t take a paycheck for the first three years — there are still employees at Burgess Civil with employee numbers lower than his. He ran the business and the projects during the week and estimated on weekends. Then a divorce settlement put him millions of dollars in personal debt in January 2020, and COVID shut down his residential work ten weeks later. Ben walks through all of it: the broken hammer hanging in his lobby, cutting from 95 people to 60 and getting back to 100 within 90 days, the heavy equipment simulator that catches operators who’ve never actually run one, and the daily green/red scoreboard that tells every foreman whether he made or lost money that day instead of sixty days later.

If you’re building a crew, deciding what to self-perform, or trying to figure out how to keep good people in the trades, this one is for you.