The Question That Stopped Our Shop Cold

Chad rolled into our Knapp facility and dropped a question like a stone into still water. 

“Who bears the burden of your bad day at work?”

Thirty seconds of silence. You could hear the hum of machinery. The shuffle of boots. The weight of truth settling in.

Then, a couple brave voices: “Our families.”

It got real. It got personal.

(Business always is, whether we admit it or not.)

Chad knows something about life-altering moments. He used to run a large construction company until a tragic accident left him a quadriplegic. When he speaks about the weight of our decisions, he's not theorizing.

He continued: “Average companies send people home as good as they arrived. Great companies send people home better than they arrived.”

A great company is where you are your brother's keeper.

As family business leaders, we hold something business as financial instruments cannot: the freedom to choose people over numbers on a spreadsheet. We can put our focus where it ought to be. We get to make families stronger, not just quarterly numbers bigger.

We get to play the long game with long-term people.

After some laughs — and after convincing one of our teammates to give Chad his Harley Davidson shirt for the trip back to Utah — Chad got vulnerable with us.

He told us how hard it is to go home where his wife has to bathe him and dress him. How he hates being in a position where he can't help physically. How he loves his family and his farm, but it pains him to be on that 4,000-acre farm because he can't do what he loves most.

He can't farm.

Not in the way his hands and heart remember.

But here's what I realized: Chad was farming that day. Right there in our shop. No soil under his fingernails. No sun on his back. But every word he planted took root.

He was planting seeds of hope and love in fertile soil — in a family business wanting to do good. He was being useful in the way that matters most. Chad couldn't lay brick with his hands anymore. But he was building something stronger than any foundation: he was building us.

We can all be useful like that.

We can be our brother's keeper. We can be there. Steady. Consistently consistent in our values.

(For us, that's Humble, Hungry, and Together.)

Being values-driven isn't about posters on the wall. They're not decoration for the workplace — they're the foundation it's built on. It's about where you put your time. It's taking time for conversations that matter.

Great companies have great conversations.

I've witnessed this firsthand. They keep getting richer and deeper as trust compounds. Because in family businesses, it's family first, then business.

We're building things people feel — and futures worth passing on.

That's building for centuries.

Chad's vulnerability opened us all up. We spend more time at work than with our families. The people we work alongside become essential to living a good life.

We're doing life together. Eight hours a day. Forty hours a week. Two thousand hours a year. Those aren't just statistics, they're the raw material of relationships.

Tough days are inevitable. But when they come, we need our teammates to lean on. We need each other.

Great companies connect work to what matters: people depending on people.

Let's be patient with our bricks. But let's be urgent with our brotherhood.

We're not just building a business. We're building an invitation — for others to discover what work can become when it's rooted in something deeper.

Onward,
Matt

P.S. Chad taught me that sometimes the most fertile ground isn't dirt — it's the space between people when someone chooses to be real.