Make your own luck

by Clair D. Urbain

I used to work with a guy who, I swear, went to the Homer Simpson School of Business Management. When something went wrong (usually daily) he would exclaim, “Of all the rotten luck!”

I am not the most organized person in the world, but (doh!) it didn’t take long for me to see that his rotten luck could almost always can be traced back to poor or no planning.

During the interview with Frank Venegas, founder and chairman of the Ideal Group which is the contractor profile in this issue, what at first appeared to be a story about a lucky guy turns out to be a story about a guy making his own luck.

When Venegas won a Cadillac in a charity raffle, he felt overwhelmed by the windfall. He drove that car with great pride . . . for about a week. Then he sold it for cash to push him over the top to allow him to start a business.

From there, he has parlayed that investment into various businesses in and related to commercial construction. What a lucky man!

Ironically, luck has little to do with it. Just as it takes planning to start and finish a project on-time and on-budget, building a business takes immensely greater planning. A well-thought-out plan will almost always yield good luck.

Venegas and his family of employees have built a super infrastructure that allows free information flow and room for creativity. It’s spawned businesses that build off of the Venegas’ core of metal fabrication into several areas of commercial contracting, creating a full-service firm that can design, build and install iron for customers.

For example, Venegas was one of the many stranded at airports September 11. While others scurried and worried, he and his business associates thought through the crisis and used the time to think about how to use their expertise to address terror threats.

Based on tightened federal security requirements, they decided to design a security system that will stop a 15,000-lb. truck travelling at 50 mph.

Initial tests show they are on the right track, and within months, the company will offer a system that meets these stringent requirements. It promises to be lucrative work that fills an important need.

I wouldn’t call that luck. That’s creativity and vision at work. It’s looking at a problem with a different perspective, a different attitude. Those are the ingredients you will find successful people mixing in their work lives every day.

When rotten luck shadows your job, take a step back and see where your planning process may have fallen down.

It’s more important to know why something went wrong instead of what went wrong. It’s one of the keys to success. Mix in a bit of creativity and copious amounts of hard work and you can make your own luck.

Published in the September/October, 2002 issue of Contractor Tools and Supplies magazine.

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