518 Days at Sea
At the tender age of 14, Laura Dekker embarked on a SOLO CIRCUMNAVIGATION of planet Earth! How does one prepare for such an epic journey? How can one delineate the hundreds (thousands?) of potential problems which may occur and be ready for them? When trouble inevitably arises, what’s the best first step? It may surprise you to learn that prepping for a circumnavigation involves many of the same disciplines as long term business planning.
Please tune in this week as Wayne, a very cautious boater indeed, breathlessly describes some of Laura’s amazing adventure, lists her three main philosophies as they related to her journey and parallels Laura’s thinking with some of Dennis’ and Wayne’s thinking about planning for the inevitable ups and downs of the construction industry (remember the term “Stress Testing?”). Please share your thoughts with us – especially you sail boaters out there – at [email protected].
This is the last call for enrolling your high-potential rising leaders to The Contractor Business Boot Camp. Our last new class for 2026 begins on November 11 in Charlotte, NC. We do not have any new class until February 2027. Invest in your nextgen leaders by giving them the opportunity to learn how to work ON their business rather than IN their business. This is the best investment you will make towards their leadership future. Contact Charlotte today at [email protected] for more information.
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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.
This week I want to talk about 518 days at sea. What? Okay. Okay. I'll make it plain in a minute. This comes from Chief Executive, the newsletter I talk about all the time written by Dr. Lance Mortlock. And it came out in September of 2026. And the story deals with a young woman named Laura Decker. And at age 14... True story. At age 14, Laura Decker set out to sail around the world solo. There's a documentary about her trip called Maidenhead, and I'm not sure we can find it, but it's somewhere streaming. Okay. Now what about this is important to you? What in the world is this guy talking about? A sailing trip, a young woman, et cetera, et cetera? Well, the preparation and the training that she undertook to be able to master this unbelievable journey that took literally a year and two thirds, 518 days is amazing.
And it's quite helpful in terms of how we think about business, especially at the end. What she was interested in is, "What could go wrong? How can I foresee this? And how can I prepare for it? I know in a trip around the world on a sailboat, things are going to go wrong. What specifically can go wrong? How can I be prepared?" And this is the thing in business. So I looked up, okay, what are the real business crises? And there's only seven. According to the internet, there's only seven big crises that businesses typically face. And it seems to me if there's only seven, you can at least have some preparation for how you're going to undertake your business. You're going to preserve your business during a time of business crisis.
So Laura set out on a 40-foot two-masted catch. It's a kind of sailboat apparently. I'm not a sailor... Anyway, a catch. It was called Guppy. All of her boats are called Guppy. And they talked about the importance of deliberate practice. Again, anticipating what could go wrong and being ready for when it did. She was literally born on a sailing trip at sea with her parents. Well, obviously with her parents. She was born at sea. And so she grew up with her parents sailing and undertook her own sailing starting at age six. So she was quite an experienced sea person, seaman at that point at age 14.
So she talked about three things in particular that prepared her for her journey. The first thing is, "Do not predict the storm, but practice meeting it." You know the storm is going to come and we'll close with this as well. As a child, she's sailing with her dad and her dad would say, "Hey, the rudder is broken. Okay, what are you going to do?" Or, "Your engine's out. What are you going to do?" Or some other crisis. "Your sail just tore, what are you going to do?" And they would talk through step one, step two, step three, "Your GPS, you lost all your navigation." Kind of a big thing if you're solo at sea. In fact, she did have a sail rip apart and it came near a busy port and in shipping lanes, but she had pre-practiced what to do in this case and she was able to weather that storm, so to speak, successfully. She said, "It's important to know your realistic options before the crisis hits." So we'll come back to that again.
Dennis and I talked about ages ago stress testing your business. And Dennis put together a tremendous evaluation, which we can put a link to at the bottom of this blog post, but stress testing your business. If it makes sense to stress test your business in, I guess we were talking about 2020, why wouldn't it make sense to do it again? So Laura Decker was stress testing her sailboat, her preparation, her seamanship the entire time. Number two, when the water's rough, sometimes the fastest thing to do is to pause. That's what the Navy SEALs talk about. They say that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So it's not always the fastest making decisions or taking action, it's the smoothness of it and pausing to be deliberate about what you undertake.
She said, "Pause, breathe, and be calm. What do you focus on first? What do you focus on second? And focus on the problem at hand, make sure you've identified the real problem, not what might be the surface problem, but the real problem at hand." And finally she said, "When conditions deteriorate, whether it's in sailing or in business, people need clarity and confidence." She said, "You need to create the human conditions that allow for resilience." I thought it was great advice from a woman who's not now 14, but still pretty impressive wisdom, I think.
The third thing, preparation is what remains when you're running on empty. Contractors are so busy and you've heard the term burnout, but the idea of getting up on Monday, working all week and probably it goes into the weekend as well. And so I would say that so many of our members are this close to not burnout or exhaustion, but they don't have a great deal of reserves either. And so what she talked about was being at sea in horrible conditions and having to stay awake for three straight days. Well, that's not conducive to making good decisions at all, is it? Even when we're a little fatigued, our decision making drops precipitously. So she talked about being prepared well in advance so that she could overcome her fatigue.
And in business, you have to make decisions with less-than-perfect information all the time. So if you can identify what's crucial, now we're going to get to the seven business crises that the internet helped me define and there's not that many. So there's macroeconomic crisis, there's IT and cyber crisis becoming a bigger and bigger thing, loss of a key person or key people or key customer, natural disasters, obviously, legal or regulatory crisis, supply chain crises, and then reputational or brand crises. That usually doesn't affect our members too much because they're so diligent in taking care of their customers.
So if there are only about seven big crises that a business could face, why couldn't you stress test and pre-prepare for those seven crises? I'd like to hear from you. Email me at [email protected]. What do you think? Is it that simple? There's only seven business crises? And if any of you are sailors, maybe you can tell us about the magnitude, the immensity of what this young woman undertook at the age of 14. Share that with us as well.
This is Wayne Rivers at PCA, where We Build Better Contractors.
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