Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 114

Here's an excerpt from an article I recently read, "Perryman’s Culture of Listening and Trust," in Tharawat Magazine:

Your family business started with a fascinating founder’s story. Could you tell us a bit about its history and how it all came about?

When my father was growing up in the 1940’s and 50’s, it was a time when your parents were your career mentors and trainers. In other words, your first jobs were working for whoever your parents worked for. My grandfather was employed at a company called Black’s Bridge Building Company, so naturally, my dad ended up working with him, building steel bridges all over the southeast. But my father started to realise that the job wasn’t interesting enough for him – he wanted to do more.

So he decided to enlist in the Korean War. During the war, my dad learned masonry, plumbing, and carpentry, skills he acquired as a result of prepping bases for the troops. One of the more important things that I remember from his stories from that period was about his change in mindset after dealing with different ethnic groups as a part of his war experience. He explained how the war either heightened or eliminated the issues of race as he got a chance to see people from different parts of the world work towards a common goal.

When he came out of the military, he, of course, had to come home and integrate back into society. He said to himself, “I’ll go back and get my old job with Black’s Bridge Building Company. And life moves on.” But when he returned, what he saw gave him a different perspective. Even though he had changed, Evergreen Alabama had not. He had become a much more open person, but his community remained closed-minded. It was very apparent to him that his newly formed worldviews were not welcome in a place where he had lived and worked for his entire life prior to his time in the military.

He realised he had to go out and make it on his own. So in 1954, he decided to start a company, and he called it Perryman Building