The Things My Dad Built

For most of my life, I thought of my dad as someone who built things.

Not in the abstract sense. Literally.

He built a company at our dining room table.

He built relationships that turned into lifelong friends.

He built things in his workshop—cabinets, stained glass, pieces that have endured in all of our homes.

And later in life, he built and repaired antique clocks—dozens of them—each one requiring patience, precision, and a deep respect for time.

What I didn't fully understand until the end is that the most important thing he built was a life entirely on his own terms.

I lost my dad last week, ten months after losing my mom.

His career started in corporate America, with Ingersoll Rand, where he moved our family from state to state—and once, improbably, to Brazil—before we landed in Charlotte, and he decided he was done following someone else's path.

He launched American IMC in our dining room in 1980.

No office. No safety net. Just conviction.

The company grew into something real—something valuable enough to be acquired by the ABAC Group. He was proud of that outcome, not just because of the success, but because of who he sold to. They had been partners long before they were buyers.

He was a smart businessman and a sharp judge of people—skills that have influenced how I build teams and make decisions to this day. He could read a room quickly and trusted that instinct.

He didn't have much patience for ineptitude or poor judgment. Over the years, people would say about both of us that we "don't suffer fools"—usually as a criticism. We never saw it that way. We'd look at each other and shrug. To us, it meant moving quickly, trusting your instincts, and holding the people around you to a standard worth holding.

And yet, underneath that edge, he was deeply warm.

He loved to hug. He loved to snuggle. He adored his dogs. He was mischievous, with a dry sense of humor that caught you off guard. He loved history and organ music and had no use for pop culture. He was kind and clear—even in his flashes of temper.

For a long time, I thought I had chosen my own path. Looking back, I can see how deliberately he shaped it.

He pushed me toward my first job through a temp agency, which became the entry point to my career. He encouraged me to leave a job I had come to see wasn't right. And when I decided to start my own business, he didn't hesitate—he backed me completely.

He also told me, often and directly, how proud he was of me.

After he sold his compressor business, he returned to something he had always loved: clocks. He and my mom even went to school to learn how to repair them. What started as an interest became another business—Myers Park Clock Company—and over the next two decades, he built a client base that looked a lot like the one he had built before. Loyal. Personal. Lasting.

It wasn't a departure from who he was. It was an extension of it.

Every Sunday night, he wound his clocks.

All 45 of them.

It was a ritual. A quiet act of care and discipline that said more about him than any résumé ever could. For all his forward momentum, my dad understood something fundamental about time: it requires attention. And once it's gone, you don't get it back.

He had already been declining, but after my mom died, it accelerated. He lost weight, started falling, and, more than anything, struggled without her.

He talked about her constantly. He had no interest in a world where she wasn't there. And in a way which felt both frustrating and telling, he wouldn't allow me to change anything in their home after she was gone—as if holding everything in place could somehow hold on to her, too.

He never intended to outlive her.

And in the end, I don't think he really did.

We often talk about people dying of a broken heart as if it's a metaphor. Watching him over those ten months, I'm not sure it is.

If I look at the full arc of his life—the risks he took, the businesses he built, the standards he held, and the love he had for my mom—I don't see something unfinished.

I see something complete.

These days, I think about him when I make decisions—quickly, decisively, and with conviction. I used to think those instincts were mine. Now I know exactly where they came from.

He's not here to wind the clocks anymore.

But the way he lived shows up in how I decide, how I lead, and what I build.