When the times get tough for Russ Burns, he flashes back to a time when he was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force and faced much more dire circumstances than anything he’ll likely ever face as the president at Clayco.
“I was flying over the water, way away from land, and we had smoke in the cockpit,” Burns says.
“I distinctly remember that panic that hits. You just think, ‘Oh my goodness, what good is going to come from this?’ We had a country off to the side of us, the only place we could really get to at that moment that was totally hostile to us. So we couldn’t go there. You have this moment and you say, ‘OK, I’m either going to panic or I’m going to do what I’ve been trained to do and I’m going to get out of this.”
Burns chose the latter, fell back on his training and managed to get the plane to safe territory. The experience serves as a constant reminder to him not to panic when trouble arises but rather to always be thinking about his next move.
“Even when business is good, that’s the way I look at it,” Burns says. “I don’t sit around and say, ‘The economy is much worse today, and that requires me to be more afraid.’ I’m genuinely coming in every day and trying to make this company better than it was the day before. … I’m certainly aware of what’s going on, but I’m not going to focus on the smoke. I’m going to focus on how to get the smoke out and how to get to where I’m headed.”
Burns took over as Clayco’s president on an interim basis in August 2007, removing the “interim” title in January 2008. He says it would have been easy to get carried away preparing for the job, particularly in light of a slowing economy that was gaining speed in its descent.
“You feel the pressure,” Burns says, before reiterating his advice for pressure situations. “Just relax. It’s when you do that, that you produce your best results anyway. Then you’re believable. Then you’re in the business producing results and people say, ‘I believe that guy. He’s credible, and he knows what he is doing.’”
Burns’ goal has been to convey his confidence in Clayco to his employees and to keep them focused on the customer and not the economy. Here are some of the things Burns did at Clayco in his first full year to make that happen and help the 500-employee construction firm hit $770 million in 2008 revenue.
