The basicsBackground: Gilford, 66, capped a childhood in civil rights-era Alabama with a 2007 contract to help construct D.C.’s first tribute to that era’s most famous face, Martin Luther King Jr. With that memorial to be unveiled in August, the Beltsville civil engineer is now vying for his fourth project on the National Mall. Gilford has faced plenty of life’s darkest moments — he lost daughter, Kesi, to fatal lupus complications — and yet says he still wakes up each day “tickled” to be alive.
Education: Bachelor’s in civil engineering, Alabama A&M University
First job: I worked all my life on my dad’s farm, starting from 6 years old.
Family: Wife Ollie, son Louis, in Silver Spring
Business strategy
Biggest current challenge: The same one I’ve had all along: access to working capital and surety bonding.
On client care: I’m a believer in customer satisfaction as the first step to customer loyalty. Do whatever it takes to keep them coming back. Satisfaction does not always equate to customer loyalty. There are certain clients, no matter how hard you work for them, they’ll turn around and make you bid the next job against the world. So there are certain clients we don’t do business with because of that. We look for clients that realize a good quality firm and take that into consideration when they have their next project.
How do you keep a competitive edge? Once you get the job, give it everything you’ve got. As contractors, we allowed ourselves to become a commodity, and we’re not. We’re a service provider. Everyone’s not going to give you the same type of service. Oftentimes, we have clients who look for the lowest bidder, and you usually get what you pay for. We have a saying in the construction industry: You pay with peanuts, you get monkeys.
Judgment calls
Best business decision: Trying to accumulate as much working capital as I possibly could from the very beginning. The key was to accumulate it faster than our growth.
Hardest lesson learned: Putting people in responsible positions who were not 100 percent trustworthy. Sometimes you know in the back of your mind, but you’ve got so many things going on and you’ve gone through so many people that you finally say everybody has some flaws and you try to trust them. And I don’t know how you guard against that.
How do you recover from failure? A lot of prayer. If you focus on not turning bitter towards people and towards society, you come through it. By far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to contend with was the loss of my daughter. Anything else shy of that, I almost grin at it. Other things come and go.
True confessions
Most people don’t know about engineers: We are very precise people. We rarely see gray areas. Everything’s black and white.
Guilty pleasure: I’m really into photography lately, the restoration of older images.
Personality in high school: Very into sports. Basketball, baseball, football. I could play ball all day, every day.
Car: Ford Fusion hybrid. I am totally green. We recycle everything. I’ve even had energy audits and LEED improvements to my house.
Where were you when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot? I had just left work. I was working for IBM and hadn’t even graduated from college. That day, I had just bought a used MG from one of my co-workers. That night, we had a rally that led from the campus to downtown Huntsville, and a reporter was trying to get through the crowd to the person speaking. He sat on the front fender of my brand-new car, and I worked him all the way through to the front of the crowd.
Favorite book: John Henry Johnson, “Against All Odds”
Favorite restaurant: TJ’s in Beltsville
Favorite place outside of the office: Taking pictures in Ocean City. We have a place there that we go to at least once a month.
---------------------
Source: Washington Business Journal, Friday, July 8, 2011, Commercial Real Estate Section
No comments:
Post a Comment