This is Under Pressure, a podcast where we dive into the untold stories of entrepreneurs and business owners who have conquered adversity to achieve greatness. And now here's your host, Nic Staton.

Welcome to another episode of the Under Pressure Show. I'm your host, Nic Staton. Today's guest is Bob Kovacs Bob, if you would, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your background and stuff like that.

Nic Staton

So I grew up in New Jersey. I've been here in Georgia since 2007. I've worked in the residential commercial construction industry for the past 30 years. Most recently, for the past 20 years on the pre-construction and estimating side on the commercial construction. And for the past year or so, I've been heading up a pre-construction group for a small general contractor in Sandy Springs, Albion General Contractors. We do fire stations, libraries, a lot of municipal work, some private work. We did a large project for the Atlanta Humane Society, so a nice mix of stuff.

Bob Kovacs

That's what's up. What exactly got you into that?

Nic Staton

I always just enjoyed working with my hands. Growing up, my father did a lot of work around the house. I was always helping him out. So we got into the construction side of things, but then got more into management as opposed to the hands-on. Went to college for construction management up at New Jersey Institute of Technology and kind of been doing it ever since.

Okay. And what'd you say the name of the company was that you worked for?

That's Albion General Contractors. About 20 year old, small, yeah, I'd say small to mid-sized general contractor.

Okay, that's what's up. And we work for a lot of builders and GCs and stuff like that. Mostly like Grassman Cook and Buckhaven and Integra.

They were a little bit smaller than those guys, but yeah, similar.

I've noticed that there's a lot of construction companies, and there's, I guess, different tiers to it or whatever.

Yeah, without a doubt. One of the challenges, honestly, is like you said, there's so many companies here. Every national company's got an office here, and there's smaller companies like ours as well. And when the market slows down, which it's starting to taper a little bit, All the big guys start looking at smaller projects just to keep themselves going and keep their people busy. So it makes it harder for us where you used to make, typically you get say four or five companies looking at a project and now all of a sudden there's projects that are getting 10, 15 bids just because everybody's looking at everything but staying busy.

Sounds like pressure washing. I went to a bit for a school the other day and there were 17 companies there. It's like, geez Louise.

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, especially when it's price driven, it's like, I don't want to be the low bidder out of 10 companies. So that means I missed something.

Right. No, I completely understand that. So I guess like some companies are backed by like a private Investors and then a lot of these other companies that are bigger actually have, I guess, investors that don't really care what's going on with political stuff.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, our company, you know, we're privately owned, we're actually an employee owned company, ESOP. So, I mean, we all own a stake in the company. The bigger companies that, you know, the big national publicly traded companies, yeah, they've got, you know, they put out a, forecast and are going to do $4 billion worth of work, you better figure out how to do $4 billion worth of work because they don't want to report to their shareholders that they're not doing it. So they'll go out and just scramble to take any work they can get.

Makes sense because it's kind of chaotic right now. It's kind of weird.

Yeah, like every time there's an election, everybody starts with, oh, we got to wait till after the election. We got to see what happens with the election before we can decide to move forward on something. And you'd say, so does that mean like if candidate A wins, you're going to do it? Candidate B wins, you're not? No, no, we just want to see what happens. Like, well, if it's going to go forward or not go forward regardless, why are we waiting exactly?

So one of the companies that we got on with that we were following behind, they, uh, had a lot of projects going on then there at the end, they were like, we're shutting down completely because we don't know what's going to happen. And because they did that, it literally stuck so much of a gap in between everything that now it's like you said, they're running around trying to scrape pieces together.

Yeah.

Um, what's been the hardest part of all of this so far? Um, the hardest part of what the, in that type of business, because most of the, most of the people that are listening from, from my audience are catching like, uh, marketing people, pressure washing stuff like that. So I'm trying to open up that diversity to other industries so that they can understand how other people deal with pressure and. Um, hard parts of what their industry is just in case maybe somebody is looking to get into that.

Well, I think like any, you know, any industry, like you said, you see the same thing, you know, there's a lot more competition and yeah, you got it. Well, you've got to keep enough work to keep your people busy and keep everybody fed and keep money coming in at the same time. You don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to work for free and you want to make sure that, you know, you're not putting yourself in a bad spot. So, you know, especially on my side of things, you know, I had all the bidding and, you know, the estimating. making sure you got the right number that's going to win you the job without being so low that you're not going to make money, and making sure that the numbers based on good data, you don't have a bad number that's going to leave you short because you didn't do due diligence up front. Kind of like the pressure washing industry, it's got to be the same thing. You go out and take a bunch of measurements as to how much how much area you need to wash and then figure out what your time is. Well, if you mismeasured the area and you missed a couple thousand square feet and now you're out there longer than you're supposed to be or that you plan to be, then you're losing money. So same thing, just on a different scale.

Right. That's why I say that everything that I do with this podcast, it all goes into ties into every different industry, you know, because we're all dealing with pressure mindset. A lot of people are starting things from ground zero. And then a lot of people are getting into it with other people and stuff like that. So it's like teamwork and stuff like that as well that people need to understand, you know, you can't do everything yourself.

Yeah. Now, the good thing about this company I'm with now, prior to being here, I was working for a much larger company and much larger projects. Our typical job is probably $5 to $10 million, I would say. The previous company I was doing projects that ranged between $300 and $500 million. and you make a miscalculation on something that large, you're not missing a couple thousand dollars, you could be missing a couple million. We're doing a large million and a half square foot facility for one of the auto manufacturers. Say you had to go in and wash that space and you missed that by even 10 cents a square foot, that's $150,000. The tiniest little error is just a huge magnitude when you've got a project that big. And so, yeah, the pressure, you know, with something like that was just enormous. And it was one of the reasons that I decided to go back to working for a smaller company. I mean, when I wasn't sleeping and, you know, stressing over stuff, you know, all weekend and all, that's, that's not a good place to be.

Right. So your stress levels down, down some, but you're still, still deal with some pressure, but just not.

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's always pressure on that level. Yeah. I mean, regardless of what size company you do, you're responsible for people and making sure everybody's busy. And yes, there's some level of pressure, but it's definitely not the same as when you've got tens of millions of dollars on the line.

Right. Do y'all just do projects here in Georgia? Are y'all spread out?

For the most part, we're here in Georgia, but we've got some clients that ask us to go to other places. We don't go out actively looking for work in other spaces, but we do a lot of work for like one company that does a bunch of charter schools. And we've gone to, we just went down to South Carolina last week to look at one for them, and we're doing one up in Tennessee. Just got another company we work for that kind of does hospitality stuff all around the country. So we've gone to California and Texas. We don't, we don't go out to California and go, Hey, let me go find some work out here.

It's just, if somebody's more or less, they attract you all. And then they ask you to come out there.

Yeah. Yeah. They, they like working with us. They ask us to help them out on another project instead of them having to go hunt for, you know, contractor in a new place. So, yeah, but most of our works here.

I understand that. That's cool. And y'all are, and you, like you said, you're mostly doing, what'd you say? Uh, schools and.

You know, municipal stuff like fire stations, police stations, we're breaking ground this week on a new library up in Blue Ridge. What else? They said a lot of charter school work lately, college campus stuff. We're doing the project over at Kennesaw State, a couple of projects down at Georgia State right now. And then we do some private stuff as well. We built headquarters for Atlanta Humane Societies for their headquarters down in Atlanta about four years ago. And since then, we've done a couple smaller. They've got these little like kind of community clinics and resource centers that they've been building. So we just finished one of those up in Roswell. It's a nice mix of stuff.

Was that Humane Society thing or whatever off kind of by itself?

No, it's over on Perry Road down there in Atlanta.

Oh, okay. Cause they did something, uh, not too far from where I live. It's kind of near another warehouse, but it's just like a humane societies of some sort or whatever. And it's just off kind of by itself.

I was like, yeah, I mean, pretty much every county has got one. It's just a matter of, you know, the size of it, you know, based on the, usually the smaller areas have smaller, uh, smaller spaces as Atlanta obviously covers a large area. So they've got a pretty substantial, uh, facility.

Right. Yeah. Atlanta's pretty big. I'm in South. I'm down at the very bottom here.

Cal.

Know where Serebii is?

Yeah.

I live right next to that. Okay. Yeah. That place has changed my whole area.

Yeah. No kidding. That was like the, uh, the crunchy granola, you know, hippie, uh, enclave down there.

Yeah. And now they've got, uh, another section that's phase three and basically, I guess, You got 10 acre lots, but no 13 acre lots, but 10 acres of it is fenced in for horses. Three acres is where your house is. You'll buy the three acres, but you're going to rent the 10 acres and you're going to have livestock on it. And you're going to rent that for somebody. It's interesting. I'm like, they're constantly pulling money from.

Well, I think for the long, I don't know if it's still this way, but I know when they first opened up the place, it was just full of all the execs from Delta, you know, because it was close enough to the airport.

That's pretty much what it is. We go in there clean sometimes or whatever, and it's just a lot of Delta people, a lot of people from California and stuff like that that just came over here. And I guess they enjoy that, living right far from the next person.

Yeah, we did that when we first moved down here. We were in a new subdivision, bought a brand new house. And like you say, you're 15 feet away from the neighbors. And we got kind of tired of everybody knowing your business and not really being able to do what you want to do with your own house. So we ended up buying another house about two miles away from the other place that's up four acres.

No HOA?

No HOA. Nobody telling me what time I can open my garage door, what color I can paint my front door. Got a shop out in the back to mess around with cars, do some metalwork and stuff. And inherited a couple of small miniature horses when we got here. So it's a little different.

Nice. I got goats.

Yeah, we've got three small goats too.

Nice. You got the pygmies?

Yep.

OK, that's what I started off with. And I ventured up to the Spanish goats and some boar mixes.

Yeah, we've got two miniature pigs that my daughter got when we first moved over here. They're supposed to be those miniature teacup pigs that were never going to be bigger than this. And when they came home, they were that big at eight weeks. And now they're 100 pounds. Like, well, that doesn't work out. So luckily, we've got the barn for them.

I actually want to get some pigs because I'm tired of losing money on my goats. I'm like, I ain't really getting nowhere on that. So maybe I need to venture into some pigs and see what happens.

That's the thing. I mean, we've got, we've got them all, you know, we're not, you know, ain't none of them going to ever be food. So like you say, they cost you money. They don't, uh, you know, they don't make you any money. We had chickens for a little while. It was the same thing. I mean, at first, yeah, they're laying a bunch of eggs. Everything's great. You know, you're kind of probably break it even after you pay for their coop. But then after two or three years, they stopped laying and now, yeah, you're paying the feed, feed a chicken. If you ain't willing to, you know, to, to cook it, it's, you know, it's another free loader that's costing you money.

Yeah, I learned that they only lay for, I think, two to three years. And then after that they stop production. So you're supposed to cycle through new chickens or whatever in order to keep that up. Oats, they get parasites so bad that they dang die left and right out here. So that's like the hardest part with me.

Yeah, we had one that did that a couple of years ago. We had four and now we're down to three because one of them got some kind of parasite or bacteria or something and ended up getting anemic. So yeah, it's not fun.

No, not at all. How do you challenge or how do you manage your mindset?

Well, see, the big thing is you know, I, I used to beat myself up and stress myself out a lot. I mean, there was definitely, there was definitely external stressors, but I would, I, you know, just concern myself with things that didn't need to be worried about. And I think over time you start to, you know, kind of realize that you're doing that, you know, after you worry about something enough times and realize that whatever it was you were thinking was going to happen, doesn't happen. You can kind of reset your, your head and start, you know, not worrying about that anymore. So it's really a matter of, you know, when something comes along, um, you know, thinking about what the possible outcomes are and what the, you know, the chances of each of those outcomes is, you know, and, and looking back at, you know, past times where something similar has happened and saying, yeah, you know, last time I was worried about this didn't happen. And you're kind of able to shut it off or at least hopefully it will shut it off. So you don't have that same thing running through your head again.

Right. Yeah, that's the biggest challenge with a lot of us is we get stuck into. different things that happen throughout the day. And a lot of it's reoccurring stuff that we've already gotten past once before, but then it stops us. And we're like, man, I don't know if we can actually, if I can actually do this, but that's why I like to tell people, we have two voices in our head. One of them's good. One of them's bad. And one of them's trying to stop you constantly, no matter what's happening. And then the good is, is there to remind. of things that you've actually accomplished and gotten past. So the more that you get out and challenge yourself, the more you're actually able to get past those bad times when they come up. It's not that they're not going to come up, they're going to all the time, somewhere throughout your journey. But it's just a matter of us getting past that. Yeah.

Like you say, I think over time you learn, obviously you learn from experience. And like you said, if something comes along, three times and none of those times that you've had the issue that you were worried was gonna occur. Fourth time it comes along, you kinda hopefully are more confident that it's not gonna happen and you avoid the stress that comes along with that worry.

What's been like the best part of this whole journey of you being in construction and stuff like that? What do you really enjoy the most out of all of it?

I like being able to see the end result of what I do. I know people that have jobs where they're just pushing paper all day or running numbers, accounting, whatever. I mean, obviously, there's an end result in that as well. But it's nice to be able to drive down the road and point at something and say, hey, I built that or I worked on that. I remember back when I was in college, I did one summer as an inspector doing quality control for a bridge project. They were taking a surface traffic light on a large interstate And putting it, you know, an overpass in. So I spent the summer down there, you know, putting, you know, inspecting concrete and pipe and dirt work and everything. And when it finally opened, you know, as we were driving, we'd drive down the road and You know, drive underneath that and be like, oh, yeah, I worked on that. You remember this? I remember that, you know, even if we didn't have to take that, you know, that exit, I kind of like, drive up over the right over the bridge and around and come back down and continue on the way. People like, why are you so excited about this? It's like, it was just kind of cool to be involved in it, you know, and, you know, a lot of the buildings that I've done over the years. One of the last projects I did right after COVID was, I don't know if you're familiar with that, New Signia Hotel down by the World Congress Center in Atlanta. I did all the pre-con on that. It's like a $340 million project. And you work on something like that for two or three years, and then it finally gets built. And it's kind of cool to be able to walk in there and see the actual lobby. You've seen the drawings, and you know what it's supposed to look like. But until you're actually standing in the middle of it, it doesn't really come to life. So it's kind of cool to be able to do that in different places.

I like that. That's a lot of times what I do when I ride by places that we've cleaned. It's like, we did that.

Yeah. Yeah. My wife and my kids are always like, why are we looking at this stuff? Why are you so excited about it? It's kind of cool.

It's weird that no matter what industry that you're in that. The type of work that you do is like embedded into your brain to where you go places, even if you go out of town, you're like nitpicking that type of work that you do.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's definitely that's definitely that that perhaps like in addition to my day job, I do a lot of. you know, got a little side business doing some metal fabrication and do some, you know, some welding work and some CNC plasma cutting, making saw lines and things. So, you know, as you venture around, you start, you know, seeing welds that, you know, don't quite look like they should, you know, and you wonder how, you know, I see, I know other welders who are like, uh, like six flags or something. And they look around at the, you know, the Wells's are standing in line to go get on a roller coaster. And I look at it, I was like, man, I don't know if I should be on this thing, you know, looking at how that thing was put together. It's just, you know, it's just a, it's a force of habit, you know? I mean, you probably do the same thing. You're walking down the street. You're like, man, that driveway is filthy.

I do, it don't matter where I go. I actually was on a date not long ago and sat there the whole time. I was just sitting there nitpicking things. She's like, can you not focus on pressure washing? I was like, that's what I see. I see it's dirty.

Sorry. Yep. Yep.

No, if I want to eat here, because I don't take care of the outside. Yeah.

I think it's just, you know, and I think it's, you know, certain people just have that personality. They can't shut it off. You know, like even, you know, there's, There's some people I work with that you can just tell it. They're there during the week and on the weekend, they're done, man. They're doing other things. They don't think about work again until Monday morning. I'm not to the point that I used to be where I'd be tossing and turning stare at the ceiling at three o'clock in the morning thinking about work. But, you know, it's still like even on Saturday morning, sometimes I'll just get up and, you know, before everybody else is doing, you know, doing their thing, I'll just go and spend a couple hours, you know, my home office working on something just so I don't have to think about it on Monday and just get it out of the way. It's one less thing I got to do during the week. Right. So I don't shut it off completely, but I also don't, you know, sweat it all weekend like I used to, which is a good thing.

So y'all are just Monday through Friday.

Yeah, for the most part. I mean, some of our projects, some of the job sites will work a weekend, like if they got to do a shutdown or something where they can't do it during the week. But yeah, my stuff's all office-based, so there's really no need for me to be there on the weekend.

Gotcha. That's what's up. What are you excited about for the rest of 2025? Is there anything that's real big that y'all got going on?

Well, we've actually been kind of in a growth mode. We sat down last summer and kind of charted out the next five years of where we want to go. And we've made some strategic hires. I was actually brought on last year as part of that growth mode. You know, kind of help us grow from being a smaller firm into doing, you know, a little bit more bigger projects, more complex projects. And we've made some really good hires. We've got some really good opportunities coming up that I think the latter part of this year is going to really, you know, start to show the. The fruits of all of that, because it was a big investment to bring people on ahead of time. And that's, you know, it's that whole chicken or the egg thing, you know, I want to grow. Can I afford to bring people on? Can I hire a sales guy? Can I hire another project manager who's got a certain kind of experience so we can go after jobs in a new market? Or I go and try to find the jobs, but I don't have the project manager, so now the client doesn't wanna hire us because we don't have somebody with that on their resume. So it's a challenge, but like I said, we made a big investment, and I think it's gonna start paying off pretty soon.

Do y'all collab with other companies or anything like that when it comes to getting projects done? Because I noticed that some of these other companies do.

There's been a couple of times where we've looked at it. A lot of times, if you look at public work, especially in Fulton County, Clayton County, DeKalb. A lot of the public works, they have requirements that you have a joint venture partner is either a minority or women owned business or in Clayton County, they call them small local businesses, you know, they're trying to keep the work in Clayton County. So, you know, if you're coming in from out of town, they want you to use, you know, smaller. that are local so they keep the money in the city or in the county. So we do that. We've gone after a couple of projects like that. And if we don't have them as an actual partner at our level, we'll have subcontractors that we bring in and try to use local subcontractors to work with us.

OK. Yeah, because I noticed that some of these other companies that that's, well, I had to see it on LinkedIn where they're tagging each other.

Yeah. Yeah. Like for example, if you work down at the airport, um, any project over $5 million, you're required to have a joint venture partner. And it's gotta be somebody on the, you know, like on their, um, minority of women on business. Well, that's because that, you know, their, their theory is that you're taking smaller or disadvantaged businesses and you're bringing them in. And they, like one of the projects that we, that I did down there with another firm was a $120 million project. And, you know, we were a big national contractor and we partnered up with a small local firm. And the idea is, you know, they learn from seeing your systems and how you work. And, you know, hopefully that helps, you know, kind of train them up and get them to be able to take on larger projects over time to the point where maybe they're the lead contractor and they're bringing another company in as their joint venture partner. So.

Makes sense.

It works.

Yeah. If anybody was trying to get into the industry or anything like that, what would be some things that you could tell them that would, I guess, help them?

Well, I think it depends on what side of the business you want to get into. If you look at most commercial general contractors, there's the pre-construction side, like what I do with all the estimating and scheduling. There's the project management side, which is more of the paperwork flow and scheduling and managing who comes when, what gets installed, making sure that we're building the right things, that we're building the client and so on. Then there's the superintendents out in the field who are actually running the day-to-day, scheduling the subcontractors, making sure that everything's staying on track, coordinating and solving problems out in the field if issues come up. So for a while, like in a lot of industries, there was a big push for everybody to go to college. Some of the bigger companies, they won't hire anybody without a a degree without a construction management degree or something in a related field. But I think like every other trade, we're running short on people. So you got to be a little bit more flexible. So I mean, there's a couple of different options. One would be to go get that degree and learn the construction management trade and look at them, learn how to schedule, learn how to manage projects and so on. Another would be if you've been working as a carpenter for 15 years and you understand how You know, projects go together. You could look at becoming an assistant superintendent or superintendent for one of the construction companies. And, um, a lot of them are starting to go back to, let's say hiring without a degree, just because they need people. It'll take somebody who's got it, who has experience or has good customer service skills and, you know, train them up in, um, you know, what they, they need to learn. So I would say, you know, if you're really interested in doing it, just start, you know, hitting up some contractors, checking out LinkedIn and seeing what postings are out there and then start applying.

That's what's up. Yeah, cause I mean, I feel like the trade is really taking a decline and people wanting to actually go out there and do that. But at the same time, that's one of the things that's going to be thriving here over the next couple of years because of it taking a decline like it has. It's like, it's either you're going to be in trades or either learning how to work AI in some way.

Yeah. Well, I mean, for years it, you know, they said that the push, even I was growing up, you know, the push was for everybody to go to college. And over time that became more and more of the, you know, the trend that it wasn't necessarily that the, you know, the kids were saying, I want to go to college. It was, you know, like there were a lot of times when, you know, they'd say, I want to be a carpenter. I want to do this, but you know, I want to do that. And their parents were saying, no, you got to go to school. You're not going to be working. You're not going to kill yourself working with your hands and your father's done that for 30 years. You know, you need to go and get a degree. And it seems like that's starting to shift a little bit because there's so many kids that are coming out of school and can't find a job because, you know, they're in debt so damn bad and they ain't getting a job for what they actually go to school for.

So why did I go to school? I guess just to party.

Yeah. I paid, you know, 60, $70,000 to get a degree in a career that you're on a trade or a career that, you know, the skill that doesn't really apply or that there's too many other people in. So, yeah, I think there's a bit of a shift. I mean, I'm starting to see more, you know, a lot of the high schools for the longest time were getting rid of their wood shops and metal shops and all their shop and welding classes and all. And they're starting to turn that around and, you know, take out some of those computer labs that they were putting in and bring back some of the trade training because every, you know, because, you know, all the contractors are screaming for people. And you've got kids that are more than, you know, capable of doing it. So let's give them the skills and put them to work.

Yeah, I feel like you're in your 20s and stuff like that, and you actually get into some trade, you're like a light years ahead of your generation.

Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, you start swinging a hammer for 30 years, it's going to wear on you without a doubt. But if you're smart about it, you either learn the trade, and start your own company where you're now managing other carpenters and you're running the work and doing the estimating and all. Over time, you can hang up the nail bags or at least not have to wear them every day. or you can go to work for a larger company and manage a crew as a foreman, or you could take that and go work for a general contractor as a superintendent. You don't have to just spend the next 35 years banging nails. So there's opportunity at every level right now, man.

That's what's up, yeah. I like having other people on here, because I mean, you never know who's listening to this and somebody could be wanting to get into that industry. It helped them out a lot. But I guess, I don't know if people, my last thing normally that I ask people is how would they find you? I guess I could ask you that. How would people find you if they needed to or anything like that?

I mean, the easiest thing to do would be to email me. It's bob underscore kovacs at hotmail.com. It'd be the easiest thing to do.

Okay. That's what's up. Well, Bob, I appreciate you coming on here and taking your time to discuss some things with us and giving us the insight of what a construction side is of everything. And I hope you enjoyed yourself on here.

Yeah, man. Yeah. Love talking.

Well, we're going to end that right here, guys. And I appreciate you coming on here. Peace.

All right. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. And remember, pressure doesn't break you, it makes you. Until next time, friends.