Fall arrived in Wilmington, NC today. Gray skies, falling leaves, quarter-zips, lows in the mid-40s. Autumn comes to North Carolina much later than where I grew up. On Maple Drive Farms in Addison, Michigan, the temperatures drop and the leaves start to fall in mid-September. Corn, tall, dry and crackling in the wind, waits its turn to be harvested by big, lumbering combines, rolling across fields separated by quickly thinning lines of trees.
The falling leaves remind me of building a pole barn. Our farm, perched on a hill where we watched the corn grow green then brown, didn’t have a barn. Dad decided one gray, fall day, that now was the time to build one. Given the simple structure we wanted to erect, the entire barn could be finished before the freezing temperatures descended on the lower peninsula. But it was just me, Dad, and my kid sister. And we built the barn through a Michigan winter. I was 15.
It’s important to carefully place and dig the post holes for the four-by-fours that form the skeleton of a pole barn structure. We had an auger that hooked onto the back of a 1970 Ford tractor and drilled at a 10 degree angle - it ran into misfortune in a previous project - so we dug holes that required precision by hand (with post-hole diggers). We took turns digging, 10 scoops on, 10 off. Near the end of one of my turns on the sticks, I complained that this job was hard, harder than it looked when Dad did it, and that I wanted to stop. Dad let me finish my allotted 10 scoops and then paused to tell me a story his father had told him about watching men dig a ditch in the 40’s. “You watch the men in the ditch and think, wow, that looks like hard work! Good for them. But then you’re the one in the ditch, and you realize that this is really hard work. And you want to, but you can’t quit.”
We finished the barn (it still stands today). I left the farm, flew jets in the Navy, and eventually settled in Wilmington with its late falls and mild winters. Dad’s “men in the ditch” stayed with me. I’ve thought about them while enduring physical challenge - “this is harder than I thought, but I can’t quit” - but lately I’ve come to appreciate the story in the context of the ever-deepening ditch of the business world. The tenacity takeaway remains, but the moral of the story shifted as I got older. It’s possible to respect the hard work and effort required to build something, without fully appreciating the exertion required to accomplish the goal. Business operations (sales, marketing, HR, finance, engineering, etc.) and success can’t be fully understood without direct engagement and hard work.
We talk to builders at 37th & Moss. Owners, founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs. Ditch diggers. We appreciate the teams they’ve built. The relationships they formed. The value they deliver. Their grit and determination through uncertain times. The personal and professional risk they took. We are ready. With shovels and pick-axes and post-hole diggers and fresh legs. The leaves are falling. The corn is in. Let’s build a barn together.
