Rick Gardner has ridden bulls, built a roofing company, engineered spacecraft, and worked with startups and the biggest lesson he learned was the good call and the right call aren’t always the same thing.
Today, Rick Gardner is an EOS Implementer, but before finding his place with the Entrepreneurial Operating System, his career took him through bull riding, roofing, engineering at Lockheed Martin and Hewlett-Packard, startups, investing, and coaching entrepreneurs.
Rick didn’t plan most of those turns. His first career ended with an injury, his first business grew faster than he understood why, and some of the smartest people he worked with built products that customers never even wanted. Through all of these experiences, he got better at assessing risk, learning from misses, and knowing when it was time to try something different.
A hailstorm made Rick look pretty good at business
Growing up in Colorado, Rick wanted to ride bulls for a living. He admits he didn’t think too far into the future. When people warned him he could be “crippled by the time you’re 40,” his reaction was basically, who cares? He wanted to ride bulls.
Then an injury ended that career. Rick says his whole identity and everything he wanted to be were stripped away, and all of a sudden he had to scramble to figure out what came next.
He worked in the oil fields for a while and leaned on skills he already had, like welding and roofing. Starting a roofing company seemed like a decent way to make money without having a boss, so Rick got going with “me and a truck and a hammer.”
Then a major hailstorm hit his community.
Roofing jobs poured in. Rick hired people, bought equipment, and watched the company grow. He figured he must be pretty good at running a business.
But the demand didn’t last. “You’re not growing because you’re smart,” Rick says to his former self. “You’re growing because you’re lucky.”
The company survived, but Rick had to scale it back and become much more careful about growth from there. He mistook a temporary burst of demand for proof that he knew how to build a growing company.
If sales jumped next quarter, would you know why? Before adding payroll, equipment, or overhead, you have to know whether you built something repeatable or just caught a very good break.
The boss didn’t have to know everything
Rick kept the roofing business running while he went back to school. Engineering felt ambitious for someone who had started with remedial math at a junior college, and more than one person questioned whether he would make it.
Rick decided the one thing he could control was how much effort he put in. He earned straight A’s during his first year and finished his engineering degree in four years. By then, he had also put the roofing company “in a box.” It would get him through school, but it wasn’t the destination anymore.
Some of his old ideas followed him into his new career, though.
Rick grew up in a blue-collar family, and his picture of leadership came from the foreman on the job site.
The foreman knew how to do everything, trained everyone else, and was the smartest guy there. Rick carried the same assumption into leadership roles: “I had to be the smartest person, or else how could I be the boss?”
His logic stopped working once he had people reporting to him who truly knew their jobs better than he did. A mentor gave him another way to think about his role. Rick didn’t have to personally produce every result. His product was a high-performing team.
The change in perspective helped him become a more effective leader. He could spend less energy proving how much he knew and more time building a team that could perform without waiting for him to supply every answer.
If everyone still looks to you when something gets complicated, is your expertise really needed, or has the company learned that you’ll always step in?
Smart people can still build the wrong thing
After college, Rick wound down the roofing company and accepted a job at Lockheed Martin. His wife had encouraged him to get what she called a “big boy job” and put the engineering degree to work.
Rick enjoyed the technical side of aerospace. The bureaucracy drove him crazy, but he also saw what all those rules, processes, and procedures could accomplish. Thousands of people had to work together to send spacecraft enormous distances with very little room for error.
Later, at Hewlett-Packard, he saw another problem. Rick worked around brilliant engineers who were excellent at solving complicated problems. They weren’t always as good at figuring out whether the market cared about the problem in the first place.
Some failed products were, in Rick’s words, “a kick-ass solution that nobody in the market wanted.”
The technical skill was there. The customer demand wasn’t. Rick learned to spend more time understanding the problem before putting money and effort into the answer.
He ran into a related lesson later at a startup behind automated house-key kiosks. Early prototypes helped prove the concept and attract customers and investors. Then orders grew, and the company found itself selling machines that had been built to prove the idea instead of supporting higher volume.
Rick says they reached a point where more orders could “crater the business” if they kept selling those prototypes. The team had to rethink the product and build the processes needed to manufacture and fulfill it at scale.
Getting customers is one problem. Serving a growing number of them without breaking the operation is another.
Mentors beat figuring everything out alone
Rick worked for companies that invested heavily in training, but when he looks back, the formal classes aren’t what he credits most.
The bigger value came from experienced engineers and managers around him. They mentored him, answered questions, and gave him access to people who had already dealt with problems he hadn’t seen yet.
Rick noticed the contrast because he hadn’t had much of that support when he first went into business. “I just thought I had to figure it all out myself.”
Years later, Rick found himself doing similar work for other entrepreneurs. He helped build an early-stage startup investment fund and incubator in Buffalo, New York, along with a coaching program for founders. He started trying to teach them what he had picked up from businesses, engineering, startups, wins, and failures.
Rick jokingly describes it as building “the leadership methodology according to Rick.”
Then he read Traction. “Holy crap, this is kind of what I’ve been trying to do, but much more elegant and beautiful than I could have ever done myself.”
Rick also noticed which part of his work he liked most. It wasn’t the investment fund getting a big return. He loved sitting with founders, mentoring them, teaching them, and helping them work through problems.
When family reasons brought him back to Colorado, Rick decided to make that work his focus and became an EOS Implementer.
Some lessons take a few tries
Rick’s career gave him many reasons to reconsider what he thought he knew. A hailstorm taught him that fast growth could come from luck. Engineering taught him that brilliant solutions still fail when customers don’t want them. Startup work showed him that more orders aren’t automatically good news if the operation can’t handle them.
His career also pushed him to change direction. Bull riding ended. Roofing became a way to pay for school. Engineering led into startups. Startup work led into coaching. Each chapter gave Rick something useful without needing to become the thing he did forever.
And one lesson took longer than the others: admitting when he needed help. Rick describes it as being willing to admit when you’re “out over your skis.”
You can read all the books you want and gather all the knowledge you can, but if you can’t admit you need another person’s help, your chances of getting it go down considerably.
For someone who once thought the boss had to be the smartest person on the job site, that may be one of the more fitting lessons from a career full of reinvention. Experience gave Rick more knowledge, but it also told him to question the easy explanation, pay closer attention to risk, and know when somebody else might have an answer he doesn’t.
To hear more from Rick about lucky growth, failed products, leadership, and his path to EOS, listen to Episode 29 of the Hitting the Ceiling podcast.
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