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Buddy Tudor - Entrepreneurial Hero

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Buddy Tudor…in his own words

Entrepreneurial Hero Interview

 

 

Aside from being an energetic, resourceful and successful entrepreneur, Buddy Tudor was a generous and compassionate civic leader. Among his many contributions, he served as one of the guiding forces in the creation of Cenla Advantage Partnership. He was a founding board member and served on the CAP Executive Committee from the beginning as well. To say that we miss him would be a considerable understatement.

 

One of Buddy’s great passions in his role at CAP was entrepreneurship and our Entrepreneurial League System. He was a fearless champion for this work and helped to shape it based on his own experiences as an entrepreneur.

 

A few weeks ago, we had the privilege to interview Buddy Tudor about those experiences. That interview is presented here with pride, gratitude, and respect. 

 

Jim Clinton

 

 

Buddy Tudor

Tudor Construction Company

Words of Wisdom

 

 

  • If you don’t feed off challenges, you don’t want to be an entrepreneur; you need to have a job.

 

  • I think, to be an entrepreneur, you must want to create something that is unique, and it is essential to be able to profit from it. 

 

  • One of the things that I would really tell entrepreneurs is just because you think it’s a good idea doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea for that market, and trying to determine the market needs for what you want to do is number one.

 

  • It doesn’t matter what the business is, the better you know what your cost is, the better off you are. 

 

  • Control is everything, no matter what your business is. Accounting is extremely important; it’s the first thing you need.

 

  • Take care of your health. I didn’t; I was too busy.

 

 



 

Entrepreneurial League System

Mentor Interview Form

 

 

 

ELS Mentor Interview:  Buddy Tudor – Owner and Operator of Tudor Enterprises

 

Date: September 24, 2009

 

Location:  Alexandria, LA

 

Interviewer:  Gary Perkins and Felix Mathews

 

 

 

Gary:  “How did you get started?”

 

“I started working as a water boy. To be a water boy, you had a package you put on your back that you put ice water in, plus paper cups. Then you went around to all the workmen and offered them water so they didn’t have to take water breaks to go to the water keg.  I started doing that at about eleven or twelve years old, plus worked in the field doing things that aren’t done now. 

 

“We mixed our own concrete.  Now, everyone uses ready mix concrete. Back then, you had a gravel pile, a sand pile, and cement sacks that you trucked in and set up behind a mixer with a hopper on it. They would put the gravel in, then the sand, and weigh it on a little scale. I’d sit there with a shovel, and if I needed to add sand to the wheelbarrow, I would put it on or take it off. That’s how we mixed our concrete.  After I got strong enough to do that well, I eventually became a carpenter’s helper, etc., and worked my way up in the business.  It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be going into the construction business. It was so different from what it is today. Back in those days, if you had a family business, most of the time it just was kind of understood that you’d be going into the family business.  I can’t ever say I sat down and said, ‘Well, do I really want to do this or don’t I?’ It just kind of happened.

 

“I’m 74, was born in 1935, and came up during World War II.  I really got my start when I came out of school, then the Army. Tudor Construction Company, per se, was formed in 1946, when my dad came out of World War II,  but construction in our family started in the early 1900s, (1919-1920s) with my grandfather, who started a construction company with a Mr. Roland.  It was Tudor and Roland originally, and their accountant was a gentleman by the name of Jimmy Ratcliff. 

 

“When my grandfather and Roland broke apart, my grandfather had Mr. Ratcliff, who is the father of Robert Ratcliff of Ratcliff Construction Company, work with him. The company was called Tudor and Ratcliff until 1946.  My father grew up working on the projects. He went to Louisiana College, got a degree and worked with Tudor and Ratcliff for a number of years.  Then, in 1946, he formed Tudor Construction Company with my grandfather. 

 

“I went to LSU and received a degree in engineering.  Today, there are a lot of construction management degrees, construction technology degrees, etc., but back in the 1950’s, there weren’t any, so my degree is actually not a BS but a BE, a Bachelor of Engineering Degree.  I took different disciplines of mechanical, electrical and civil, and there were only five of us that ever received that degree.  They started that degree after World War II for about eight or ten years, but now they no longer offer it.  Normally, when I tell people I have a Bachelor of Engineering Degree, they say, ‘No, no you have a Bachelor of Science Degree. What was your major?’ But I have a Bachelor of Engineering.”

 

 

Gary:  “But that was your apprenticeship.”

 

“Absolutely, and that was the same kind of thing for my friends in the retail business in town.  They came up in the retail stores.  I was raised to be a building contractor. During those years, right after World War II, you just assumed you were going to be in the Armed Services. When I went to LSU, you had to attend two years of military training, mandatory ROTC, which was later done away with.  So, like most everyone, I said that I was going to serve; I wanted to be an officer. I went ahead and went through ROTC, graduated, and served my time as a Second Lieutenant. I came back in the spring of 1958 to join the construction company.

 

“My grandfather died in 1956, just ten years after he and my father started Tudor Construction Company.  I actually took a short tour in the Army, which was available then with a very long eight-year obligation in the Reserves, in order to get back into the family business, because my grandfather died. 

 

“I came back in the spring of 1958, and at that time, Tudor Construction Company consisted of myself, my father, and one estimator, Mr. Cliff Johnson. His son, Bill, now works for my son, John, in his construction company, Tudor, Inc.  We had an accountant, a receptionist, and one bookkeeper.  We were doing a million or a million and a half dollars of volume a year, which even back then wasn’t a lot. We were mainly a local Central Louisiana firm, although my grandfather and father had worked out of Central Louisiana.”

 

Felix:  “What type of construction were you doing?”

 

“It was strictly building construction, commercial buildings and schools.  A lot of work back then was precipitated by the people coming out of World War II.  We grew from 1958 through the eighties. Our early growth dealt with a lot of schoolwork and a lot of college work, because you had veterans coming back to college, which mean you were doing dormitories and classrooms.

 

“After that, we did a lot of grammar, elementary and high schools.  We built a lot public buildings—post World War II type things.  Later, we got involved in the private sector for developers.

 

“I want to say a few words about family businesses. Family businesses have their advantages and disadvantages.  It can be a blessing and a curse.  Many times, you get back in the family business and find that it was just big enough to support the family then, one person, but now, when you are a second person, it gets more difficult.  That was the case back then.  When I came back, I looked at what we were doing, what the bottom line was, and said, ‘You know, this has got to change.  It’s got to grow from here.’ I was very much into seeing the company grow. 

 

“My dad and I had different personalities.  Dad was much more laid-back, oriented to the work he did in the field over the years, and liked to spend his time out of the office on the jobs.  I had more of my mother’s type A personality, and I wanted to go, go, go. It worked out well. 

 

“I think a lot of company businesses don’t work out when the father and the sons or daughters’ personalities are too similar; both of them want to be the decision makers and the bosses, or, in some cases, one of them doesn’t want to work.  I was very fortunate in what my dad’s expertise was, and that he wanted to be involved in the field end of things. I wanted to grow the business from the office end of it—estimating, acquiring new work, etc.  We were very compatible from that standpoint, but to think that everything was ‘just fine and dandy and you slip in a business’ well, that wasn’t what it was about at all.  We were building a business from that point as a team. Early on, my challenge was that if there wasn’t enough business in Central Louisiana to support the two of us, ‘What was I going to do about it?  What I was going to do back then was that I was going to the other parts of Louisiana that had the business?’

 

“However, as a general contractor, you had to be the low bidder and the competitive bidder on all this public works work. One of the things that we ran upon very early on was that most everything back then was unionized.  The unions were such that you didn’t move your people from one area to another.  You could move your superintendent and what-have-you, but the idea of taking your sub-contractors from this area to another area; it just didn’t happen.  If I went to Monroe, I had to deal with Monroe subs and suppliers and so forth. Shreveport was another set.  So, everything was very difficult to move back then.”

 

Gary:  “What years are we talking about here?”

 

“1959 to the early seventies, when the right-to-work law came through. I was moving around before then.  I had no way early on of knowing that that would ever change.  I had to work within the system that existed, a unionized system, that precluded general contractors from moving from one area to another, particularly in Louisiana.  That wasn’t true all over the United States, but it was in most places.”

 

Gary:  “I remember how violent that change was, and there were several people who died over that.”

 

“I could tell you about a project I was building in Baton Rouge.  Years later, I had a knock on the door, and the police were there.  This was seven or ten years after we built the project. They wanted to talk to me. They’d been dealing with one of the Angola inmates who was trying to cut a deal, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you about how this guy got killed in Baton Rouge.  The way he got killed is, one night after we dug some foundation holes and left for the night, they dropped this guy down in the hole and poured concrete on him the next day.’  So that was the type thing that was happening during those years. 

 

“That was a huge challenge I faced.  There isn’t enough work in Central Louisiana to support me and my dad, and this system was set up where you can’t go in other parts of the state and work, and I had to break the system.  We were probably the only contractor during that period that was a Louisiana contractor that eventually became successful doing business in Monroe, Baton Rouge, all along the coast in Houma, and Thibodeaux. Once it became non-union, that made it easier.  It was a very, very difficult period, trying to build a construction company, increase the volumes, and thus the business.”

 

Gary:  “Did you ever fear for your life during that period?”

 

“No, I really didn’t.  We worked within the system; we didn’t challenge it.  When we went into those areas, we dealt with the unions.  Probably the biggest problem was, you couldn’t take any of your subcontractors into other areas, so you had to convince other subcontractors that you were going to treat them right, you were a good contractor. This was while the other general contractor competition in that area was telling them they did not want them quoting you anything, that you were this guy from out of town, keep the business locally, etc.  Those were the type of things that we dealt with.

 

“When I came into the business, my market was smaller than I would be happy with trying to make a living.  So, how did I change that market?  The way I changed the general contracting market was to go into other geographical areas that had more building going on, etc.  Once we expanded in Louisiana, I always wanted to go to that next level.

 

“By the late 1980s, we started an industrial division, which also helped my market that specialized in mill right and erection work, and did things like removing a cement plant in Dallas, Texas and re-erecting it in Fernley, Nevada.  We’d built some people movers at Epcot in Florida, and moved into regional as well. That was the way to expand the business in an area that wasn’t Houston or Dallas.  If I had been living there, the market would have expanded within that city fast enough to take care of what I was trying to accomplish.  But, if you’re from Central Louisiana, you’re going to find that in things other than general contracting. 

 

“A lot of people can be successful today because now there’s enough contracting in Central Louisiana to be successful.  I’m only using this contracting as an example of the way it was back then.  Now, my son is very successful with Tudor Inc., which he owns a hundred percent of, and operates.  I am not involved in his construction company. His choice is to stay in Central Louisiana, and the market is fine for him here.  It wasn’t in 1958 and 1959. 

 

“I don’t want people think that to be successful in construction you have to leave Central Louisiana.  That just happened to be where I was at that point in time.  We had kind of a unique situation in Central Louisiana during World War II.  The whole area was a military base jumping off place. Back in the early 1940’s, the construction occurred at Camp Claiborne, Camp Beauregard, Camp Livingston, Esler Field, Fort Polk, and so forth.  

 

“That generated a lot work for local contractors, and it was absolutely a booming economy.  But, what happens with that kind of situation is that you end up with new contractors, bigger contractors, and then, suddenly the market goes away.  The war’s over; there’s nothing else to build.  That created the market problem in Central Louisiana, which had all of these contractors like Barney Presser, R. J. Jones, Lewis Buffkin, Ratcliff Construction, and Tudor Construction Company.”

 

Gary:  “You have to do something else.”

 

“Yes. You have to do something else. That’s what led me into other areas. At one time, in the late 1980’s, we were the largest commercial contractor in the State of Louisiana.  We kind of went back and forth with some guys out of New Orleans.  We’d done business in Missouri, and even had offices in the Denver, Colorado area, where I built some ski condominiums.  We were based here, but out market expanded to other areas.

 

“Right after I came out of the Army, they were inventing something that was really catching on.  It had been invented before; it was called a computer.  When I tell stories about how business was done back then, people just scratch their heads.  There were no cell phones.  The first copy machine was called a Thermafax, and it was an old brown sheet that you could make a copy on, but about a year or two later, it just disappeared. For most copy work, secretaries used a typewriter and carbon paper.

 

“I remember when they invented electric typewriters, because early on, there weren’t even electric typewriters.  I have the first little hand computer, a little ten key ‘jobbie’ that Sharp put out. It was about 8” X 8” and about 4” thick. I couldn’t wait to buy one, and they cost $600.  It couldn’t do half of what you can go to the drugstore now and do for $6.50.  Back then, there certainly was no fax machines, no cell phones or anything like that.  No e-mail, no anything.

 

“One of the big challenges was going out of town. Let’s say I was going to bid a job in Monroe, Louisiana.  We would have to put our estimating people, which consisted of an estimator or two, me, and my dad; maybe four or five of us, into a car.  We’d go get a motel room in Monroe. We’d get a couple of rooms so we would at least have two telephones.   You’d take all your paperwork and everything up there, and then you’d start calling around on those two telephones to contact the subs in that area, to tell them where you were to get your bid.  A commercial contract back then and now is a totally different world, but back then, particularly if you were an out of town guy, they didn’t want to give you their price until about five minutes before the bid was due.  So, you were sitting there in a room, in a place where you couldn’t get telephones other than the two that you had, and you had to take all of your bids by telephone. You were scribbling them down, trying to compute them, and you’d have someone go to the bid opening at the architect’s office.  Remember—no cell phones, no anything like that. They’d try to locate a telephone so that you could call them. Then, they would literally run from the time you gave them the bid, into the place that they were turned in, and often you’d hand your bid in, if it was due at 2 o’clock, at 1:59:30. 

 

“We were operating in motel rooms.  We’d take our light bulbs with us to have enough light in there to see.  Now, that’s like the dark ages.  So that has all changed.  Back then, you didn’t have PCs to do what you can do now.  I was always looking for a better way to do things.  There was kind of more or less a standard way all general commercial contractors put a bid together, where they’d have basically all the concrete on the job in one section.  Then they’d have all their carpentry in one section, and so forth.

 

“I found that it was very difficult, as the job went forward over a year, to keep up with how we were doing. Basically, if you waited until the end to find out you weren’t doing too well in the general contracting business, it could be too late. 

 

“During the ensuing years, I became a part of a national organization and went to meetings, and we’d compare information. I’d put my estimates together by item.  In other words, if it was concrete walks, the estimate item would have the amount of forming priced out, the amount of concrete priced out, the amount of finishing priced out, the amount of wire mesh in it, etc. 

 

“So, when I went up and looked at that, they were 30% complete. I could apply it against those items, and then it wouldn’t be.  This was totally new territory but we created that in-house to give us better control, because control is everything, no matter what your business is.  Basically, we ended up computerizing Tudor Construction Company.  In 1959, we computerized our cost accounting and payroll, and were the first in the State of Louisiana to do that.”

 

Gary:  “How big was that computer?”

 

“It was huge.  It had drives that were like a foot by a foot.  It was incredible.  Now, of course, the same system that we set up that took the big computers is the same system they use on the PCs. Now, all estimating and bidding is done on computers, and that makes it easier.

 

“We tried continually to get a control on cost. Presently, I own and operate a restaurant.  We also manage all types of buildings, etc.  It doesn’t matter what the business is, the better you know what your cost, is the better off you are.  I can’t tell you the amount of people that seem to just kind of go through life fooling themselves, or go through business fooling themselves, thinking it’s one way, and they don’t know until it’s way too late.  Accounting is extremely important. We’ve always had very good accounting departments and accounting systems, and that’s the first thing you need.

 

“An entrepreneurial spirit is something that a person either has or doesn’t have, and they can have that coming back into a family business the way I did that’s existing, and they can use that entrepreneurial spirit to build in that business. Of course, what we’re dealing with in the League of Entrepreneurs is that many are starting their own business. 

 

“There are certain things that an entrepreneur has that I think that are essential, and need to be recognized as such.  As much as I came up in construction, one of the things I marked into was more commercial development, of which construction is a part.  So what distinguishes that?  What is an entrepreneur and what’s good and what’s bad about it?  I think, to be an entrepreneur, you need to want to create something and it’s essential to create some profit from it. Truthfully, there are entrepreneurs that are strictly profit driven, and the creative side is not that important to them. 

 

“I am going to use an example of being in the restaurant business, which I have been in and out of since I got into the commercial development.  A lot of people think, ‘Well, your business is construction business,’ but I was doing construction for some very big developers. That is really what separated and distinguished our company for a number of years.  We were very, very involved with developers. 

 

“I looked at what developers were doing. I’d build an office building, and hopefully we would make a construction profit on it.  We’d finish it, walk away, and then basically we’d have to go find another one to do to keep the organization going, whereas the guy who owned that building had a pretty good deal. 

 

“They got to keep it, and if it worked and their income was greater than their outgo, then that was there forever. What distinguishes construction from development is that getting repeat business is very, very difficult.  Contractors build a lot of buildings that have never been built before, and will only be built once, and that will be the only time that that will be built with that person. 

 

“You do get repeat people, but that’s uncommon.  I really liked the idea of doing something that had continuity to it.  You build a shopping center, it throws off a profit for the next twenty or thirty years until you sell it, as opposed to building it one time, making a little bit of profit, and moving to the next one.

 

“I liked this idea, but what really appealed to me was creating something that you can start with your own idea, and a blank slate.  If it was commercial real estate, like an office building, I could determine if the market was there.  I could determine why I thought it would be a good idea, what the design would be, and I could control the architecture.  I would basically put it together, obtain the financing, do the preleasing, and hopefully fill it up. I would own it and manage it. 

 

“If you’re just building it, you build it and leave.  If you don’t have an entrepreneurial spirit that enjoys that ride, you don’t need to be an entrepreneur, because as exciting as it sounds, everyone of those things can go berserk on you, and you can lose money on everything. One of the things that I would really tell entrepreneurs is, ‘Just because you think it’s a good idea, doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea for that market. Trying to determine the market needs for what you want to do is number one.’  So many people go into something because they feel they are good at doing it, and they probably are.  Whatever it is, they want to feel like. ‘That’s what I want to do, because I am good at it.’ 

 

“The question is, ‘Is the market there for you?’ There are different ways to go check that market out. I’ll give you an example of a young man I am involved with who is interested in doing a carwash.  Well, is there enough of a market for the carwash? 

 

“Well, you can just say, ‘Yeah, I kind of feel like it is,’ and you go do it.  That’s not a good way.  Go to all the carwashes in town, park your car across the street for a day, and count how many washes are going down, in each one of those.  Now, come back and do your homework on how many of those there are to draw off of, and ask yourself, ‘How many am I going to get because I am in a different location?’  Try to understand the product that you are going to get for the market there. 

 

“Central Louisiana is a different market.  It is not the same market that Houston, Dallas, or even Baton Rouge is.  The needs are different, and the income is different.  I could talk a long time on the Alexandria market because it is very, very unique.  It’s kind of good news, bad news.  One of the things I did was work about three years to get the Grand Theatre to come to Alexandria, because the demographic of income etc just wasn’t that good, when compared to other areas that they could go build.  My gut feel in my own market analysis said that it was good. 

 

“There are experts in certain arenas that you can go pay to come do a market analysis of the different things that you want to go into, but most entrepreneurs are starting on a shoestring to begin with, and they can’t go pay a lot.  But, I am just saying, really look at it. What we do have in Central Louisiana that’s very unique is very low demographics.  If people who are going to come in and put things of a commercial nature in, are national people, let’s say a Kroger’s or a Walgreen’s or whatever, they will come in and get the demographics on Central Louisiana.  They’ll tell you how many people live in a one-mile radius, a three-mile radius, or a five-mile radius, and what their income is.  Unfortunately, we have very low income in this area.  What does not show up in that is that we also have a very low cost of living, compared to other areas, and what you should be concerned about is the difference in the income and the cost.  That’s what’s left over. 

 

“I saw today, for instance, a 2200 square foot house in the paper, and they asked, ‘What’s the cheapest area in the United States to buy this house, and the most expensive?’ The cheapest area was some place in Michigan, where that house was selling for $50 a square foot. 2,200 square feet times $50 a square foot is $110,000.  That same house, the same 2,200 square feet, in La Jolla, California, costs $2.1 million.  2,200 feet at $1,000 a square foot vs. $50 a square foot in Michigan, so that is indicative of the cost of living. 

 

“I am simply saying that for entrepreneurs in Central Louisiana, you have to look at the market.  You’ve got to look at the income stream, but you’ve also got to look at the cost end of it.  You need that entrepreneurial spirit that I speak of. One of the things about being an entrepreneur is you have to be willing to take a chance.  You’ve got to be willing to gamble.  If you don’t have a gambling spirit, you shouldn’t be in it, because basically two things can happen.  It can go wrong or it can go right, and it doesn’t always go right, so a lot of times in the business that entrepreneurs go into, including my business, all it takes is one bad mistake and it can turn around and go south on you.  You need to recognize that, and you need to be comfortable with it.  You have to be willing to take the chance to get the rewards, so you have to have that gambling spirit. You also need the creative spirit and the ability to really work hard—very, very hard. Let me tell you, whether it’s a construction company or whether it’s a restaurant or whatever, if the hard work isn’t there, it’s not going to happen. 

 

“I think the other thing you’ve got to be prepared for is that things are going to go wrong a lot more than they are going to go right.  They’re just not going to go your particular way.”

 

Gary:  “But that’s never happened to Buddy Tudor because Buddy Tudor’s never had a bad day.”

 

“If I were to start telling you all of the problems that I have been through dealing with, all facets of it; you wouldn’t believe me. I started into real estate development heavily in the early 1980’s.  By then, I knew I wanted to do commercial developments.  I wanted to do office buildings, shopping centers, all those things I built for other people that look so wonderful.  I did a little shopping center over in Pineville, called Laysard’s Center, in 1968.  That was really my first try at any type of shopping center. I had a 15 year lease with A & P, and I felt then that I had to get 15 year financing, because you couldn’t finance something longer than the lease was.  So, I built this little shopping center, and it didn’t do anything until the  late 1970s.  I also did a warehouse distribution for Western Electric out in Pineville. 

 

“I was kind of easing into it, but decided in the late 1970s and early 1980s that I wanted to go into the development business in a big way.  I pulled the trigger at that point, and this building that we’re in, One Center Court, where the Red River Bank is , I built in 1978/79. People told me I was absolutely crazy.  I eased into it, went through the problems of trying to get it and thought everyone was just going to beat my door down to come lease in it. 

 

“So, I had to go through that learning process of negative cash flow and what you do when you’re income isn’t as great as your outgo. We finally got past that, and I decided to really go into development. 

 

“Then in 1983, I started doing the Bentley.  At about the same time, I had apartment projects going in Shreveport, Bossier City, San Marcus, Texas, Lafayette and New Iberia.  All of those were simultaneous, and were going to come on stream about 1986 or 1987.  The Bentley Hotel was going, I was building a hundred and twenty thousand square foot office building in Baton Rouge, and I figured it out later that I had started and bringing on line about a hundred and seventy-five million in development projects in the mid 1980s.  Well, anyone that was here in the mid 80s knows what happened.  The bottom totally fell out.”

 

Gary:  “What were the interest rates?”

 

“I was building 208 apartments in Houma, Louisiana and I got a construction loan on it that, floated with prime.  From the time I started that building, floated with prime meant that as prime went up, the interest rate goes up. When I started that project, I want to say my interest rate was about 11% or 10%, which is very high by today’s rates.  At the end of that, my interest rate had risen to 20%, which meant that I was stuck there at the end of that project with a 20% interest rate that I had to get that filled up, and changed into another. 

 

“A real lesson in how things can go wrong one after another after another is when the bottom dropped out.  People who were not here in the mid 1980’s have no earthly idea what I’m talking about.  Every one of those projects I mentioned that I had brought on line, none of them were performing.  Everyone had turned south on me and were negatives.

 

“At that time I was doing a lot of construction for a minister in Baton Rouge by the name of Jimmy Swaggert.  At least I was hanging on with my construction.  I was surviving, but barely, because I still had to pay the banks.  Right in the middle of all of that, in the spring of 1988, I got this call about what had happened to Jimmy Swaggert. He was on television, being accused of having an affair with a prostitute. 

 

“At that time, we were doing all of his work.  All of a sudden, he was paying me six million dollars every two weeks, out of his cash flow (without a bank loan), for the buildings we were building for him. We ended up doing a hundred and seventy-five million dollars worth of work for Jimmie Swaggert.

 

“People get really confused and say, ‘Man, if you were doing a hundred million dollars, you must have making just a ton of money.’  This will shock people, but the average bottom line for general contractors back in the 1970s was 1.2%.”

 

Gary:  “1.2%!”

 

“1.2% was the average.  If you think about it, it’s the craziest business in the world.  Many a job was bid at 5% gross, and you hoped to end up with 1% at the end.  When you consider that that would be on a five million dollar job, do the math, and you’ll think I’m not telling the truth.  Well, that’s the truth, and if you want to go into the records, you can find that.

 

“What happened to us in 1988, was that after the Swaggert scandal, my bonding company and my bank came to me and said, ‘You know, he is never going to pay you, and until we see how that comes down, we’ll can’t write you any bonds and you can’t be doing any business.’ 

 

“Basically, that stopped the operations of Tudor Construction Company until I got all that unwound. I felt that I could get it unwound in a reasonable length of time and could just jump right back into the construction business. People said, ‘Well, you can’t survive, you need to take bankruptcy.’

 

“I said, ‘I will survive; I will figure it out.’  I did consulting on commercial developments in the Caribbean and Europe, plus I went heavily into development, because I love the development end, which brings together not only the construction but all those other things; the concept, the creative, the financing and so forth.” 

 

Gary:  “You once told us the figure you owed.  Are you at liberty to share that figure in this interview?”

 

“It was in the millions—and it was seven figures.  On paper, when everything went south, my net worth went with it.  You don’t build things without personal endorsements.  You can just throw in the towel and give up, or you can keep working, which is what I did.

 

“I am better off today than I ever was.  Now, there are a few more complications. I have been fighting cancer since 1993.  I am going to tell you, the stress that I went through in those late eighties was definitely a big, big factor.

 

“My dad died of prostate cancer and I have it.  It is hereditary, but my brother doesn’t have it and none of my sons have it.  The point is, sometimes what we go through is very difficult; it can affect your health.  I want to tell your entrepreneurs to take care of their health.  I got too busy.

 

“In the middle of everything going south, I came up for a checkup, went to the doctor, and he said, ‘Well, I think you are fine, but they now have this thing called TSA to check for prostate cancer. Why don’t you run by the hospital and get that checked?’

 

“I said I was too busy, that I would do it the next trip.  Well, four years later, and I didn’t know it was four years, I went to see the doctor. They said, ‘Mr. Tudor, you haven’t been here in four years.’  That was when they discovered I had prostate cancer, which had gotten out of the prostate. 

 

“My point is: Take care of your health as you go through the stress, because you are going to go through stress.  If you are not going through stress, then you are one in a million that are trying to run a company.  You have to be prepared. I didn’t.  Learn from me. Of course, I hope none of you all ever go through the stress that I was going through during that period of time, because there also were some personal issues involved.  Be ready for the failures that come along and be ready to just say no.  That’s just one of the challenges that come up, and that’s part of being an entrepreneur.”

 

Gary:  “The time I worried the most in my business when things seemed to be going good.  I always knew there was something I didn’t know about.  It was going on; I just didn’t know about it.”

 

“I guess, in ending it up, the bottom line is, even after 16 years of fighting with this cancer, I’m still here, and I’m still very active.  We still own and manage a number of properties, office buildings, shopping centers, Grand Theatre, etc.

 

“It’s been an interesting journey.  I don’t know that I can live without challenges anymore.  I think that an entrepreneur feeds off challenges.  If you don’t feed off challenges, you don’t want to be an entrepreneur.  You need to have a job.  My father-in-law with my first wife worked for the US Department of Agriculture, and he had one of those eight-to-five jobs. He’d come in and smoke a pipe, had his little dog, and he was just the nicest sweetest guy that ever lived.  I would see that and knew it was a different world.  That fits some people perfectly, and that’s what they should be doing.  They shouldn’t be trying to start as an entrepreneur.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, the trip that I’ve been on.

 

“Would I do it a little different?  Yes.  I would have gone and see that doctor a little earlier.”   

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