Why Builders Build Businesses

As a boy, I watched my father leave for work each morning.

For years, I didn't understand what that meant.

One day, I went with him.

I saw the shop, the customers, the wires, and the tools.

I saw how one repair led to another, how fixing a television turned into fixing a home, how work multiplied the moment it was done well.

He wasn't just repairing machines.

He was building a world around his craft.

A business.

Later, I found myself walking the same path. I worked for other large firms with their own weight and rhythm, but I always returned to my own company as if some part of me couldn't stay away.

Why is that?

Why do designers, builders, and subcontractors so often return to their own work, their own name, their own company?

Because building is not only about the object.

It is about the frame that holds the work.

It is about the system that allows the craft to breathe and endure.

A wall cannot stand without structure.

A business is the structure of the builder's life.

To work only for others is to lend your hammer to someone else's design.

To build your own business is to lay out your own foundation, imperfect and unfinished though it may be.

The Buddha said, "Whatever is to be done, do it with all your might; for the spiritual life that is slack will never lead you to the goal."

For some of us, that discovery is not only the beam or the drawing.

It is the act of building the space where our work can live.

The business is the dojo.

The practice is the building.

Field Note:

The business you build is not separate from your craft. It is the scaffolding that allows your craft to rise.