The Yeager
Journey

Our journey began as a couple of handymen doing odd jobs, and now continues as four brothers, a wife, a son, and many friends who operate several office suites buildings. The journey includes many interesting stories, a long list of hurdles we overcame, and many other family and friends who made it possible. Before I share the details, I hope this journey story motivates the ordinary person who doesn't feel they have incredible talent, high intelligence, or a superior education; know that if a group of ordinary people, or a community of such, or in our case an extended family, will unselfishly work together, a lot of good can come out of it. Our family has seen this play out, and we now believe that the power of this approach grows as the community that helps one another expands. But we didn’t realize how we could use this principle to help other businesses until after we were at the end of our journey, or so we thought was the end.

It wasn’t long ago that we were closing in on our trail's end. We were preparing to sell our business and hang up our boots, but halfway along, a son presented a plan to extend our cooperative approach and to share the things we had developed, along with some new automation that would greatly benefit others. Thus, our hope is to provide these benefits to those we are already serving and perhaps a few others. For my son who presented the plan, and for all of us who believe that the principles and synergies gained by a community can have a dramatic impact on those we serve, we have put our boots back on. We believe that this way of doing business is more in alignment with the way God intended, with a focus on sharing and cooperation rather than a competitive “me against them” paradigm.

It is now our hope that the portion of our journey we’ve walked is merely the beginning of a brighter path ahead, one that we hope to walk together, perhaps with many of you. But we want to share here our past story, and as we look back, we remember the many decisions that guided our path. We made a lot of good decisions and had our share of bad ones. There were many turns between being a handyman and a commercial general contracting business, and many more from there to operating office suites buildings, but there were no dramatic leaps in our story, just a lot of little steps.

Necessity drove how we began our journey, and the theme of our beginning was penny pinching and penny stretching. From the beginning, the handyman position was meant to be a temporary plan, one that came out of necessity. I had just come out of a company that went bankrupt and since I hadn’t been paid in a couple of weeks, it seemed like a fast solution to keep a family with no savings and that lived paycheck to paycheck off the streets. Our initial business financial strategy was one of deferral: credit card A paying off credit card B before the interest accrued, followed by credit card C paying that debt until we were out of credit cards and actually had to pay something. The business truly survived by the skin of our teeth in the beginning years. The business plan was coupled with a family plan that involved many breakfast, lunch, and dinner options centered around bread. Peanut butter and jelly, French toast, cheese sandwiches, and tap water were regulars in our home. We took as little money from our earnings as possible because we needed to buy supplies and tools and needed to save for a work van and trailer. In those years, my wife knew the Sam’s Club staff very well because buying a loaf of bread was almost a daily routine that involved touring the store at lunchtime to let the kids take advantage of every food sample the store had to offer. The hungrier the kids were, the more laps around the store she took.

This is all rather embarrassing, but I mention some of this because I believe the mindset of watching your pennies, saving, and never taking for granted what tomorrow brings can be a valuable mindset at times. Likewise, starting from a position of desperation kept us grateful for our customers and drove us to do more for them than they expected. Our clients knew we cared about them and we took our work for them very seriously. As a result of this, we never advertised from the day we began as handymen all the way through being a commercial general contractor with 60+ employees, not one time. Again, I think starting from nothing and having to scrimp for our first tool and every one thereafter was a good “disadvantage”.

Now to move along to the story of how we began our office suites, it was not a genius plan but a more serendipitous one. At that time in our journey, my brother Todd and I were growing and hoping to transition from remodeling projects into designing and building convenience store/fueling stations. Because we were competing against large and reputable general contractors, we knew we would be tested for quality and speed. The two of us needed to complete the projects as fast, or faster, than the big guys or we would lose our opportunities. So, we just migrated into an unusual work schedule whereby we worked 18 hours and slept 6, repeating that daily until we completed the big projects. Eating involved anything edible that you could fit in your nail pouch and eat while working. There were times we even slept on the jobsites. We worked seven days a week, and because demand was high, I can remember a spell of about 8 years where our 7-day work week of 12+ hours per day lasted for 8 years with no vacations; and holidays were only half-days off. I am not proud of this, and don’t recommend it to anyone, but it is truly the way it was. I only mention it to serve as an example of how not to live and work. It is an easy trap for some of us to fall into, and being slow learners, we fell into it repetitively, and unfortunately, my family suffered for it.

Anyway, let’s get back to how our journey brought us to operating office suites. We were doing pretty well building convenience stores with a high level of quality and quick construction times, much quicker than the big guys could achieve by subcontracting projects to separate companies. Todd and I self-performed most aspects of the projects: installing the petroleum equipment, most of the electrical, plumbing, etc. With the addition of brothers David and Mark to the team, we added design flair, site work, and every other trade to the list that we were able to self-perform. The impact of all four of us each doing our part was dramatic and observable; it was impressive to those watching.

With the addition of a few employees, which included our dad and eventually our mom, we were making an impression on a couple of the oil companies and a lot of C-store operators. Again, there wasn’t anything special about us, we just tried to work hard, and we cared a lot about taking care of our customers and producing a great product. So as the oil companies were considering us, in particular Marathon Oil and Crystal Flash, we knew that an answering machine on the kitchen counter in our apartment wasn’t an acceptable home-office for them to visit. This led us to purchase a warehouse in downtown Noblesville, of which we converted the front portion into four finished offices, a conference room, and a front reception area. It was impressive and really made us look legitimate. Once we finished the buildout, we invited a few of the Marathon and Crystal Flash teams out to visit with us. They were impressed with our office and that was the start of a good relationship between us and them. But after all this was complete, we realized that, other than my office, we had a beautiful, but mostly unused space.

As friends and guests saw the setup, it just made sense to share our space; it was nice that they could use the offices and share the conference room and lobby. It turned out to be a great solution for them and a lot of others as well. The interest in our space spread so quickly that less than a year later we were operating a 48-suite office suites building with a healthy waiting list. Our first “building manager” for that space was a travel agent who wanted free space and was willing to sit at the front desk while conducting her business. We didn’t pay anything for a receptionist, and she didn’t pay rent for her travel agency space. It was really nice, and by the time she retired, we had hired an administrative person for our construction business who doubled as a Building Manager.

I would like to say that the rest of the journey was smooth and easy, but it wasn’t—not because there wasn’t a huge demand for office space but mostly because we always struggled with raising capital and acquiring bank financing to grow, especially since hardly anyone knew what office suites were in those early days. For every “yes” we received from an investor it took a couple dozen “no” responses to get there. And the worst 60 days of our business came when we had to face off with a demand from our bank that they were terminating our loan. We had many millions of dollars of debt, and we were given 60 days to clear it, not because we weren’t paying our loan payments or meeting our requirements, but because the bank was positioned in a way that they needed to terminate the loan two years early. But, like the rest of the obstacles, we found a way over it.

There were many other interesting stories along the path to today, which includes our moving to Texas to continue adding more to our numbers. Suffice it to say that the journey had tired us out; by the time we finished a few buildings in Texas we were done. All was going well, but we were just tired. But sometimes a spark, or a son, can ignite a tired group to life by revealing a new purpose. And that new purpose is now also a mission that we hope goes beyond our business. Our hope is to develop a community of businesses, including our own, that work together in way that is more productive than doing it on our own. We aren’t chasing a big financial benefit from our plan, we simply hope to provide a new level of service that is about sharing and caring for others: everything from community grass-roots marketing, a lot of sophisticated software systems, AI, robotics, and a bunch of business-systems automation that we can eventually share with the ones we are already serving. And we hope that the concept is contagious so that the benefits to everyone in the community expand as the synergies and sharing grow.

In our journey ahead, we hope to be able to provide a few solutions for some big hurdles that most small businesses don’t see coming, yet they are coming regardless of whether they are seen or not. There are some big things in everyone’s path ahead that are going to impact every business, and everyone stands stronger in a community that cares about people and shares automation and information for the better of the group. Two are better than one and a group is better than two; and this is true even for the big guys. So, we are investing in and looking for the solutions to the hurdles we see on the horizon out ahead of all our paths. We believe the next several years are going to present some hurdles that could trip up some businesses that won’t have the resources to address them all on their own, and we hope our plans will provide the help they need. And for those businesses who can provide the resources, it will be much less costly to go as a group. Although we hope to soon expand by building a bunch of new buildings in Indy, it isn’t that growth that excites us as much as growing in new ways to serve.

Ultimately, we hope that our path will have the opportunity to share with and serve yours. Yet, we wish the best for you and your families, and for those you serve, even if your path doesn’t mingle with ours. Best wishes to everyone and may God’s peace live in us all and be a sign seen by all.