Craig

Craig had been building for sixteen years. the post-covid construction boom had been good to him, more work than he could handle. then the supply chain broke. material costs doubled. three key subcontractors went under mid-project. Craig was managing every project personally because the volatility meant every project was a problem waiting to happen. supply delays, cost variations, subcontractor failures, client escalations., all of it came to Craig. he was working seven days. renegotiating contracts at 9pm. the architecture meant every project genuinely did need him because nothing in the structure had ever distributed that authority anywhere else.

the margin picture was worse than Craig knew. reporting was reactive. Craig found out at project completion what the margin had been, not during the project when he could have done something about it. three projects completed in the prior six months had delivered under 4% margin. two had lost money. Craig had been attributing it to the supply chain. the supply chain was part of it. the pricing and the lack of real-time visibility were the rest.

Craig's working week dropped from seven days to five within the third cycle. margins recovered to 14% within twelve months. Craig described it as the year the business stopped running him. the supply chain beginning to normalise was part of the recovery. the structure was the rest. without it, the normalisation would have arrived into the same broken architecture.

market volatility doesn't create founder dependency. it weaponises it. structure doesn't prevent the hard times. it makes the hard times survivable.