The boy listened, but the man has been unable to pull himself away.
Put on a bulldozer for the first time when he was 9 years old and mentored by a father and grandfather who provided for their families the same way, Bailey says he just has too much dirt in his blood.
“When I tell people ‘I’ve been around this business all my life, there’s the proof,” Bailey says, pointing to a black and white photograph taken in March of 1959 where a 3-year-old Jack Bailey, his father and grandfather are all present.
After dropping out of college due to what he calls “impatience,” Jack started a small grading company with a partner who eventually bought him out. He then went to work for a development firm in Virginia Beach where he was placed in charge of construction. In the early 1980s he bought that company’s Fredericksburg-based division and built Bailey Hassell and Associates, a construction firm 120 employees strong.
However, “the stress almost killed me,” Jack recalls. “I remember the first time we hit $3 million in sales and I looked at the margin and thought ‘That’s pretty sporty,’” he says. “Then I hit $10 million in sales and the margin was the same frickin’ number.”
In early 2001 he liquidated that business. “We had some clients go broke on us and we took a hit for almost $5 million,” he says. “What I learned from that experience though was that when you get to a certain size, you stop building projects and start building files. I hated it. Years later, I had a conversation with the Lord one day in a Denver hotel room that if the opportunity ever comes up to get back into that business, I said I’m going to do it differently and I’m going to do more with less.”
