Luck is a force that is out of your control; it is believed that success or failure is apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions. People who believe in luck often look for reasons why things aren’t working out instead of taking personal responsibility for the outcomes. Personally, I don’t believe luck has any place at Castro Roofing — I believe in hard work and executing on the opportunities.
At Castro Roofing, we don’t even believe in bad luck. We believe in good planning and execution — no excuses. We don’t leave anything to chance because our clients wouldn’t appreciate it if we left the condition of their roofs up to luck. It’s our business to execute on our plan and deliver high-quality results time and time again — we have no other option.
I believe that hard work creates success if you are making the right decisions. Hard work by itself is not sufficient. If you work hard at the wrong things, you will be working hard, but you won’t be getting the results you want. To make correct decisions, you must actively learn from your past experiences, learn from others, and be proactive. These correct decisions, combined with relentless hard work, are what lead to success.
When you wait for things to happen, you have less control of the outcome. But if you are proactive, you can reach out and grab opportunities that will lead you closer to your goals, or you can move out of the way. That’s why we perform annual strategic business planning, quarterly planning,
and monthly meetings at Castro Roofing — so we can be proactive, know where we are going, and be prepared for the opportunities we find.
One of our core values is continued learning and improvement. We strive
to learn better ways to execute goals, diminish our weaknesses, and leverage our strengths. Every quarter, our leadership team reads two books for self-improvement. Every employee has access to our huge library of books, audiobooks, and courses. We also pay for seminars or courses that employees feel will continue their education — we only ask that they give a presentation about what they learned when they come back so that the entire team can benefit.
We’ll even take time to go to seminars and classes as a team. Recently, we spent three days learning how to be better at business planning. After we went through the boot camp, we took two days away from the office, rented a hotel, and built our 2017 strategic business plan. To have a successful company, everyone needs to care about the Cause (company’s Purpose) and about People. We want every single person in our company involved in creating our company’s future. It’s a team effort.
For our clients, we value success and continuing our education because we want to provide a one-of-a-kind roofing experience that they haven’t gotten from any other contractor. To do this, we study the companies that are best at creating happy customers and employees — we’ve even been studying the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ — Disney World. We know there are great
companies outside of the roofing industry that are doing exciting things.
By studying what they are doing, we can create an even more exceptional roofing experience for each one of our clients.
So, luck is always the last refuge of laziness and incompetence. I believe that people make their own luck by great preparation, good strategy, and consistent execution.
