Why I Left Harper: 10 Years at a $500M Firm

I resigned from Harper General Contractors on February 27, 2026. Ten years. Regional Director. A team of 30 people. Over $60 million in active projects. A company I genuinely love.

This isn't a hit piece. It's not a grievance letter. It's not even a “lessons from leaving” listicle. Harper is one of the best things that ever happened to me, and I want to explain why walking away from something great is sometimes the only way to honor what it gave you.

Twenty-five years of sawdust and steel

I started in construction the way a lot of people do: following my father. Cleanup laborer. I was picking up scraps and sweeping concrete slabs before I knew what a punch list was. I didn't love it immediately. I was a kid doing grunt work. But something about being on a jobsite stuck with me. The noise, the pace, the way a building goes from dirt to something people use. It gets in your blood.

From there it was carpentry. Trim work, framing, the kind of hands-on craft that teaches you how buildings actually go together. You learn more about construction in one year swinging a hammer than you do in four years studying it. Not because school doesn't matter, but because the jobsite doesn't let you hide behind theory. You either know how a load transfers through a header, or the wall tells you.

The transition to commercial construction changed everything. As a project engineer, I was suddenly drowning in RFIs, submittals, insurance certificates, and specifications. Reading drawings. Processing paperwork. Learning the language of a $30 million project instead of a $300,000 house. It's a different world. Different speed. Different stakes. I loved it.

Over two decades I worked my way from cleaning jobsites to negotiating $100 million deals. From carrying lumber to managing delay claims and leading tense contract negotiations. Every step taught me something new about how information moves through a project. Or more accurately, how it doesn't.

Finding Harper

I joined Harper General Contractors in 2016. They were a 66-year-old company at the time, founded in 1950 in Williamston, South Carolina, now headquartered in Greenville with offices across the Carolinas and beyond. When I came on, they were in the middle of rebranding and expanding into Western North Carolina. They needed someone to open and grow their Asheville presence.

What drew me wasn't the size, though $500 million in annual revenue is nothing to shrug at. It was the culture. Harper operates like a family company that happens to be an ENR Top 400 contractor. Six consecutive Carolinas AGC Presidential Safety Awards. A Philanthropic Spirit Award for community work in Greenville. They don't just build buildings. They build communities. And they'd been doing it for nearly seven decades when I walked through the door.

They hired me to build something that didn't exist yet: a Construction Technology Department. From scratch. In 2016, that meant BIM coordination, virtual design and construction, and figuring out how to get superintendents to look at a 3D model instead of flipping through a rolled-up set of prints. It was the kind of challenge that gets me out of bed.

What Harper gave me

I'm going to be direct about this: Harper made me.

Not from nothing. I had 15 years of field experience when I walked in the door. But Harper took a carpenter-turned-project-manager and put him in rooms where nine-figure deals get negotiated. They gave me delay claims to resolve and contracts to write and a team of 30 to lead. They let me open and run their Asheville office. They trusted me with their clients, their employees, and their reputation. That's not something you forget.

And the projects. The projects changed me.

ABCCM's Transformation Village: 100 beds of transitional housing for homeless women, mothers with children, and veterans. A job training center, a medical clinic, a children's educational space, all on a 24-acre site in Asheville. You don't build that and walk away unchanged. When you're framing walls that will shelter someone's first night off the street, the work means something beyond the contract value.

Nine school renovations across Buncombe County, with kids in the building while steel goes up above them. You learn a different kind of coordination when a seven-year-old is eating lunch 40 feet from your active work zone.

The Wesley Grant Center for the City of Asheville: a $6.7 million community recreation facility with a solar roof, a swimming pool, and community rooms designed to serve a neighborhood that had been waiting a long time for something like it.

Mulberry Farms. A 350-acre wellness retreat in Madison County with a net-zero energy goal, a plant-based wastewater treatment system, prefabricated guest cabins, and a private mountain road carved into terrain that fights you every step. Seven years on that one. I'm still consulting on it, because some projects become part of your identity.

These aren't line items on a resume. Each one taught me something about managing complexity, building trust with clients, and leading teams through chaos. Harper provided the stage. I just tried not to trip over my own feet.

What ten years teaches you

A decade at a firm like Harper gives you a lot of lessons. Here are the ones I carry with me:

Speed of information is greater than speed of construction. Your crews can only move as fast as the information feeding them. If your RFIs take two weeks to turn around, your schedule takes two weeks of damage. Every time. The bottleneck on a modern construction project is almost never labor or material. It's information.

Difficult clients are usually under-informed clients. When an owner gets aggressive about a delay or a cost overrun, the root cause is almost always a communication failure upstream. Fix the information flow and the relationship follows. I've seen it dozens of times.

Ego is the most expensive material on a job site. I've watched more money get burned by people protecting their pride than by any material price spike or weather event. The projects that run smoothest are the ones where everyone checks their ego at the trailer door.

Coordination beats headcount. A well-coordinated team of 10 outperforms a disorganized team of 25 every time. I've seen it on a $2 million school renovation and a $100 million resort build. The math doesn't change.

Technology amplifies whatever communication culture you already have. If your team communicates well, Procore makes them better. If they don't, Procore just documents the dysfunction in higher resolution.

The pull

So why leave?

Not because Harper failed me. Harper succeeded. That's the whole point.

I've watched this industry go through wave after wave of technology promises. BIM was going to save us. Then drones. Then IoT sensors on everything that moves. Most of it collected dust after the pilot ended, and I say that as the guy who ran Harper's Construction Technology Department for five years. I was the one making the pitch for these tools, running the pilots, trying to get adoption to stick. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn't. And the reason it didn't was always the same: the tool asked people to change how they work.

AI is different. And I don't say that lightly. I've been the skeptic in the room for every other tech wave.

AI doesn't ask anyone to learn a new platform. It doesn't require a six-week training program or a change management initiative. It meets construction workers exactly where they already are: writing emails, reading specs, filling out daily reports, answering questions from subs, drafting RFI responses, running estimates. AI supports people the way they already work. It puts the right data at their fingertips, sometimes before they even ask for it. That's not another tool to learn. That's a tool that learns you.

We are in the middle of an AI renaissance, and there has never been a better time to create functional, supportive tools that just work. Tools that don't make people feel like they have to change the way they operate. Tools that fit into existing workflows and make them faster, more accurate, and less frustrating.

I knew I had to take a shot. On myself, on my skills, on the bet that 25 years of understanding how construction teams actually work is exactly what this industry needs right now. The tools I could build wouldn't just help the 30 people on my team. They could help thousands of project engineers, superintendents, and estimators across the industry.

Why now

AI capability crossed a threshold in 2024 and 2025 that made these tools genuinely useful to non-technical people. You no longer need to be a programmer to build a custom AI assistant. You need to understand the work, the data, and the people who'll use it.

That's my wheelhouse. Twenty-five years in construction. Twenty of those in commercial. Ten at a $500 million firm with projects spanning community recreation centers to multi-year resort builds. I know how the information flows, where it breaks down, and what a superintendent needs at 6 AM on a Monday morning.

The construction industry doesn't need another SaaS platform that creates more work than it saves. It needs tools that support people the way they already operate, that surface the right information at the right time, and that feel less like “new software” and more like having a really sharp assistant who never sleeps. That's what I'm building.

What I'm building

Contractor-AI is an AI consulting firm for the construction and AEC industry. Not a software company. A consulting firm run by someone who's actually managed construction projects.

We do three things:

1. Assessment. We audit your workflows, identify where AI delivers real ROI, and give you a prioritized roadmap. No generic slide decks. No theoretical frameworks.
2. Implementation. Custom GPTs, workflow automations, and integrations built for how your team actually works. I build it, test it, and train your team to use it.
3. Automation. The recurring tasks that eat your margins: RFIs, submittals, scheduling, estimating, reporting. We automate them so your people can focus on building.

The gratitude

I want to be clear about something: this company exists because of Harper, not in spite of them.

Harper is a 75-year-old company that has survived recessions, material shortages, labor crunches, and every economic cycle the Southeast has thrown at it. They've built schools, community centers, wastewater treatment plants, industrial facilities, and projects that genuinely improve people's lives. They do it with integrity, with safety records that back up the talk, and with a culture that develops people into better versions of themselves.

Their president runs that company the right way. Our VP of operations built a culture of accountability and trust that made every project manager under him better at their job. The PMs, the superintendents, the office staff — they're some of the most capable people I've worked with in 25 years. They supported me. They nourished my growth. They developed me into someone who has the skills and the confidence to go help other companies the way Harper helped me.

And the team I led? They have the support and the structure around them to be successful without me. That matters. I wouldn't have left if I thought I was leaving a gap that would hurt them.

I'm not leaving because something went wrong. I'm leaving because everything went right, and the next chapter is calling.

What's next

If you're in construction and you've been hearing about AI but aren't sure where to start, that's literally why I built this company. Book a free 30-minute call. I'll listen more than I talk, and we'll figure out if there's a fit.

If you're at Harper and you're reading this: thank you. Seriously. What you build matters. Keep building.

One hell of a chapter. Time for the next one.