WINNEBAGO, Neb. | Dwight Morgan delayed the travel plans of son Lance Morgan on the day Lance was to depart for Harvard Law School.
"We had a house to roof," Lance Morgan says.
So, the younger Morgan joined his father's roofing crew and completed the project. Harvard Law, after all, could wait a few hours. The lessons of hard work could not.
Dwight Morgan, now 70, began his working career in farming. He ended his working career by owning and operating BID Home Improvement, based in Winnebago. The name was short for "Better Investment Deal."
A roof, the son learned time and again, was a better investment for a homeowner.
"My dad believed in child labor," Lance Morgan says with a laugh. "He was a strong believer in child labor. I think I was 7 or 8 years old when I started joining him on roof projects. At first, I'd just sit up there and keep him company. When I got a little older, I began getting shingles for him and running things up and down the ladder."
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By his early teens, Lance Morgan was commanding one of Dwight's crews, supervising the labor force assembled on a rooftop, often when the summer heat seared his souls.
The lessons and the shingles stuck. Lance Morgan has gone from the rooftops to the board room, a Harvard Law School grad who serves as CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc., a global enterprise with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
"When your (company) phone bill is $400,000, that's weird," the younger Morgan says. "It's all about scale, I guess."
There wasn't much guesswork when it came to business study, Lance Morgan says. The lessons were pounded home like so many nails on those hot summer days in and around Winnebago a few decades ago.
"I pretty much hated roofing, but it wasn't presented to me as an option," Morgan says. "But I spent a lot of time talking to my dad about small business. I learned as much about small business from listening to him as I did in business school."
Lance Morgan figures he was 11 or 12 years old when a book in a grocery store caught his eye. He was standing in the check-out line at the time, killing a minute or two.
"There was a book on taxes and I bought it," he says. "I went through the book and came up with deductions. I spent time thinking about revenues and expenses."
The book helped him piece together the conversations he and his father were having. BID Home Improvement, he soon realized, wasn't merely a job for Dwight Morgan, it represented the way he fed his family and helped other family stretch their dollars to feed their families.
After finishing a roof project one late-summer day, the son departed for Harvard Law School.
"I threw my hammer in the dumpster, ceremonially," Morgan says. "And my dad had the hammer sitting there when I came home for Christmas."
Dwight Morgan had one question for his son: "How are your grades?"
Lance had the answer at the ready. "My grades aren't perfect, but they're good enough I don't need the hammer."
Dwight Morgan, a state champion football player for Winnebago High and a veteran of the Vietnam War, has since retired from the rooftops. He still swims a few times each week to keep his sore hips loose. He resides 200 yards from his son's office.
"Dad wanted to be a graphic designer, but he quit school to make more money," Lance says. "He is your typical, hardworking, blue-collar guy."
And, the son? He followed Harvard Law by becoming CEO of a firm that now soars beyond the rooftops with projects like the $23-million federal contract secured not long ago by Ho-Chunk, Inc.'s All Native Group. The work was performed at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and at all NASA Goddard Space Flight Center facilities throughout the United States.
"It's about scale now," Lance says, responding to a question that attempts to link his work with that of his father. "I now run an international corporation. The numbers might throw him off, but the principles are still the same. It's all about revenues, expenses, opportunity and hard work."
The principles father passed to son as they climbed the ladder in Winnebago not that long ago.
