Leaving the comfort zone

Leaving the comfort zone

entrepreneurs by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

Ben Nelson Jr. says spending time away from his marine-construction business made him a better boss and made is company more successful. Now, he faces the biggest test of that as the newly elected mayor of Bonita Springs.

If you run a construction-related business in an economic downturn, why would you take on the job of a small-town mayor, too? Ask Ben Nelson Jr., the newly elected mayor of Bonita Springs.

Although the job is supposed to be part-time, everybody knows being the mayor of this small city in south Lee County is going to be more than a part-time gig. But Nelson, 53, shrugs off the prospect of countless ribbon cuttings, endless city council meetings and lines of complaining citizens demanding he immediately solve their problems.

Nelson says he learned valuable lessons from years of public service, first on the Bonita Springs Utilities board, then as a city councilman before becoming mayor. Above all, the demands of public life taught him to delegate, one of the hardest things to do for any hands-on entrepreneur. Nelson is president of Nelson Marine Construction, a Bonita Springs-based company that builds docks, seawalls and boat lifts.

"You can only do so much," Nelson says. He discovered this when he split time off for public service: "There are good people you can actually hire. That was a real epiphany for me."

Eighteen years ago, when Nelson was elected to the Bonita Springs Utilities board, he had two employees and a bookkeeper. By 2006, he had 25 employees and a thriving business with three barges plying the coastal waters building docks. He even found time to mentor employees and invented a new kind of floating boatlift for a customer.

Looking back, Nelson says his firm likely would not have grown the way it did if he hadn't become more involved in public life. "If it hadn't been for that, I wouldn't have gotten out of my comfort zone," he says.

Eight-year-old dozer operator

Nelson grew up in Bonita Springs and remembers working for his father's small construction firm since he was a child. "I've been working since I was in preschool," he jokes. At eight years of age, Nelson was driving his father's old bulldozer clearing land for Terry Street. Workers did double takes when they saw the tiny man deftly maneuvering the machine.

Nelson eventually bought out his father in 1980. The company's assets consisted of a front-end loader and a dump truck. A crane operator was the firm's only employee. The recession that gripped the country then wasn't exactly a propitious moment to buy the business and Nelson struggled at first. There were several times when his checking account dwindled to $100.

Then, Nelson got his marine contractor's license just as the sleepy fishing village of Bonita Springs began to witness the first signs of residential development. David Shakarian, the founder of nutrition-supplement giant GNC, had acquired a huge tract of land that would become the sprawling residential development called Bonita Bay. It was fortunate timing: "We were the only marine-specialty contractor in Bonita Springs," Nelson says.

Even as the marine-construction business picked up, Nelson wore every hat in the company. He kept the books, drove the machinery and supervised every job personally. Then, he was elected to the utilities board in 1990 and found he was stretched so thin he had to hire help.

This is when Nelson began to learn to delegate and trust others to manage the day-to-day operations of the business. This lesson stuck with him: "You're not going to go broke if you hire somebody good and pay them well."

It wasn't easy. "It took a long time to work," Nelson says. Finding the right people was the toughest part, but Nelson says he's got a good hiring instincts. Then, here's the trick to keeping good employees around: "You've got to pay them really well and treat them like human beings."

While he delegated the daily tasks, Nelson also found he had more time to mentor young employees who wanted to get ahead. For example, one of his laborers who "didn't know which end of the hammer to use" eventually rose to estimator, bidding on a million-dollar project with precision. "You've got to trust people, too," Nelson says. They'll make mistakes, he acknowledges, but problems in construction can always be fixed.

Hizzoner lays off

Growing up in Florida, Nelson has witnessed the manic volatility of the state's economy and made sure he built his business slowly and steadily without getting overextended. "I know what Florida's like," he says. "Someone's going to kick the legs out from under you."

Nelson Marine owns its own equipment, which includes a specially designed pile-driver system that takes only two laborers to do the job it would ordinarily take five people to do. The company also owns two acres where it can store the lumber it buys in bulk. "It allows us to be super competitive," Nelson says.

Still, the recent residential downturn hasn't spared the cautious Nelson. For the first time since he's been in business, Nelson had to lay off employees for economic reasons beyond his control and he's now down to 16 employees. Survival is essential for the remaining employees and suppliers that count on Nelson Marine to be around for the eventual recovery.

So, why did Nelson take on the job of mayor even as business declined? "We have a system," he says confidently. His wife, Lori, got her contractor's license before he was reelected to the city council four years ago and runs the daily operations. "I'm rarely the contact person."

Besides, Nelson doesn't want to be the kind of boss that micro-manages his employees.

"The worse thing you can do is go down to the job site and give orders," he says. He'll only get involved if there's a problem and otherwise lets employees do their job without interference.

But Nelson clearly relishes being in the public eye. "It's sort of addictive," he acknowledges. Politics "got me interested in debate and promoting an agenda."

Public scrutiny also made his company better because employees know they have to be on their best behavior. "Guys can't speed, spit, urinate outside," he says.

Plus, Nelson's name in the paper doesn't hurt his business because of the publicity it generates. Still, there are some disadvantages: "Developers in Bonita Springs have to stay away from me" because of voting conflicts, he says. Despite that, he says the recognition that comes with being mayor is "a net positive."

Of course, Nelson says there are disgruntled customers just as with any business. He joked with a reporter for the local newspaper who trailed him for three days during his mayoral campaign that she wasn't looking hard enough when she told him she couldn't find an unhappy customer.

Still, fellow entrepreneurs shake their heads at Nelson's eagerness to be in the limelight, but he tells them: "I'm proud of this company and we can stand up to the scrutiny."

outsourcing city services

Once bureaucracy is entrenched, it's nearly impossible to rip it out.

But young cities like Bonita Springs can experiment with new ways to provide services that don't involve a bloated bureaucracy. The city recently contracted with privately held Colorado-based engineering firm Ch2m Hill OMI to provide a range of community development services, from planning, zoning, building permits and inspection services. Those services were previously performed under contract by Lee County.

On May 21, the city approved a contract with Ch2m Hill OMI, one of just a handful of municipalities to do so anywhere in the country. Under the terms of the deal, the engineering firm will receive a base contract of $950,000 for the first year plus fees it can charge for things such as building permits and zoning applications.

The cost of the fees has not yet been established, but Bonita Springs City Manager Gary Price says they'll likely increase because the county's fees were below market rates. "There an assumption out there that business can do it better," Price says. "I can't say it's necessarily cheaper."

There are skeptics, including Mayor Ben Nelson Jr. He says Lee County's community development department was efficient and fair and he's not sure it might be any better under this scenario. "It's the devil that you know," he says of the choice.

But now that the contract with Ch2m Hill has been approved, Nelson is anxious to make permitting and zoning even easier than it was before. Although raising fees during a construction downturn is likely to anger constituents, he says the slowdown will give the project a chance to ramp up without scrambling. "There isn't a better time to build a building department than now," Nelson says.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Entrepreneur. Ben Nelson Jr.

Company. Nelson Marine Construction

Key. Taking time to pursue interests outside your business will force you to do a better job delegating.