Kingdom Business Leaders’ Steve Dulin says: Make practice hard so the games feel easy.
In this episode of Corporate Competitor Podcast, Steve Dulin discusses how his company, Milestone Construction, never missed a deadline and never came in over budget… for 20 years.
They say high school football is like a religion in Texas, and if it’s true, then Steve Dulin played in one of the state’s great “churches” at Denton High School. That is where he learned from his coach, Ken Garland, that “if you practice hard when you get to the game, it will seem easy.”
A top player on a top team, Steve was set to play collegiately at Rice University, but complications from a neck injury made that route impossible. Football’s loss was academia and business’s gain as Steve triple-majored before graduating and pursuing a career in the corporate world. He chose the booming industry of construction and, in 1990, created Milestone Construction. Early on at Milestone, Steve suffered a back injury that confined him to bed twice. During this time, Steve not only ran his company from his bedroom, he devoted himself to reading the Bible cover to cover to see what the Good Book had to teach him about business.
The answer, it turned out, was quite a bit. After recuperating for the second time, he took what he learned about the benefits of “hard practice” from his coach and applied that ethos to the biblical injunction to “write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.” The result was a robust training program that all Milestone employees went through, including recreating projects that went sideways.
“Our trainees had a tougher time defending their strategies and problem solving with us than they would ever have at a real project sit,” Steve recalled.
During the 20 years that Steve owned Milestone, the company completed 2,500 projects and never missed a deadline or came in over budget, which was nothing short of an other-worldly track record, as is the company’s record of never having to report a job-related injury.
In 2010, Steve sold Milestone and devoted himself to growing one of the country’s largest places of worship, Gateway Church, where he oversees a program that trains leaders how to run their companies and live their lives according to biblical principles. He also operates the nonprofit Masterplan Business Ministries for current and aspiring business leaders.
In this podcast, Steve shares a wide range of sports- and faith-based lessons on successfully running a business.
You will learn:
- 6:30 Why every company needs to find “down-field” blockers.
- 9:15 How to remain calm under pressure.
- 13:00 How to lose graciously.
- 22:00 The importance of “calling” in choosing a line of work.
- 28:00 The three basic traits of well-run teams.
- 29:30 The definition of company culture.
- 30:30 The importance of great processes.
Resources:
- Connect with Steve Dulin on LinkedIn.