We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Bullivant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.
David, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career
Our team at Yellow Weld has been steadily increasing our investment into creating new opportunities for young people. Through these experiences, my team has bonded more tightly and have unified motivations that hold us all accountable to our larger goals and vision.
It’s no secret that campaigns have been run for decades to devalue the trades. Mike Rowe is maybe the most well known voice advocating for a better representation of the trades and more opportunities to gain exposure through education. However, there are hard working individuals everywhere hoping to bring new visibility to these careers to renew interest and passion for their craft. After years of funneling students and student loan funds to our universities they have become bloated and self important. Our paper chasing has disconnected us from the fundamental skill building these institutions were created to provide. The ones that pay are our students. We have become so oriented around the credentials we’ve created for ourselves that we neglect to see anything more than that.
Our initiatives are not only to bring higher exposure of our field to the youth in our community, it is to provide alternative education about value, worth, and worthiness of human beings in the working world. Our people are more than the sum of their skills we can apply to the problems we solve each day. They provide energy, personality, and complex interpersonal dynamics to our team. Each of them is dynamic, flexible, and adaptable. Each of them is capable of learning, growing, and becoming more than they were when we hired them. Sometimes it takes someone else to see that in us before we can see it in ourselves. These are things that schools don’t teach, and we live this mentorship every day within our team.
Through our efforts we aim to empower young people to take ownership over their trajectory in life, set high goals, and never back down from the hardship that is a fundamental part of our life journey. Currently we offer a monthly Job Shadow open house event where we provide free mentorship to all who attend. We see a huge variety of skill level and experience, and a wide range of demographics. The women represented at these events surpasses industry averages by over 1000% which is tremendously encouraging. We hope that these exposure events can bring more people into our community and provide equitable alternatives to the 4 year college pathway that simply doesn’t serve our students like it once did.
The line between blue collar and white collar is getting thinner every day as our industries adopt more technology and the complexity of our manufacturing continues to increase. It will take many voices to dispel the stigma and misinformation that has been aimed at these excellent occupations. Every opportunity to mentor a young individual is a chance to add a voice to our chorus and build the social proof we need to approach these changes.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is David, and I founded Yellow Weld with my friend Sean in the summer of 2020. The business was created to give us a place where we could pursue the work we loved, while also giving us space to be ourselves and invest into a higher vision for our small business. Developing a purpose driven brand has been one of the most valuable elements to our success. Focusing on the personality, humanity, and equitability breathes soul into our organization and separates us from the sterile generational shops that are failing to attract young people, women, and minorities into exceptional career paths. We hope to instill the belief that many of the sacrifices we have grown accustomed to in the working world are optional, and in turn are concessions we are allowed to reject. Rigid structures and hierarchies, strict policies that don’t make room for the human element, and traditional ideas of professionalism that serve only to strip us of what makes us unique. All of these things are possible to live without, and it simply takes strong leadership, a team that believes in what we’re doing, and unwavering dedication to living these values every day.
What we create has changed through time and likely will continue to ebb and flow. Currently we provide some of the nicest custom metalwork in the Columbus region. We serve residential and businesses alike, specializing in creative problem solving and challenging workscopes. The majority of our work is high end residential where our experience working with various materials, fabrication techniques, and meticulous designers allows us to provide solutions that few others could offer. Providing clarity and transparency around our pricing is another way we flip the script on the typical expectation of contractors. The pricing on our website allows us to cut out much of the dance we all play with setting expectations and planning projects so we can focus on offering the best product and experience that we are able to.
Our participation in local workforce development initiatives is another way we give back to our community and take active roles in the betterment of our futures together. In kind, we also donate our time and services to animal shelters, recycling initiatives, and local music festivals each year. These higher purposes align our team with one another so we can stay motivated and accountable to the goals we have set together. Involving everyone on the team in all our initiatives has been an excellent way for us to build culture and community and it has been an ongoing source of excitement and drive at all levels of the business. Hosting a monthly Job Shadow event has given everyone on the team an opportunity to mentor others, offer patient guidance, and invest in the development of others.
Sean and I are passionate about creating opportunities that surpass the ones we had when we entered into our field. I would never have known that business is where I would end up someday. It was never an aspiration of mine. It began to make more sense after a few years of working with Sean for someone else. We were working long hours and hard days to add value and develop the business into something better. A few years later we realized we would have to build from the ground up if we wanted to build the business we were envisioning. I was owed nearly a year’s worth of wages when I resigned to start Yellow Weld, and lost about half of it in the legal separation to part ways with my old boss and mentor. This further motivates me to help young people understand business, entrepreneurship, contracting, and self advocacy. Sean and I truly began the business with next to nothing. Heart and dedication has taken us to where we are today.
Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?
Getting our start was actually really treacherous. Sean and I were working together at the time for another small shop where I had been striving to earn partner status. The business had not been healthy for a long time and after a few years of dedicated efforts, we realized it was likely going to be easier just to start from scratch than dig something out and change a business owner who didn’t want to be changed. It was a very difficult few years and it was a painful process to see our relationship with the business owner deteriorate into nothing after so much hard work and dedication. Leaving was a difficult step and I’m thankful I had people in my life who believed I could do better and that I could strive for more.
It isn’t an understatement to say that Sean and I started with next to nothing. Neither of us were getting routinely paid by our last job and I had been floating many of my expenses on credit to make ends meet while I was chasing a dream with someone else’s business. With a few hundred dollars between us, we rented a 10′ x 10′ storage unit to keep all our tools and we pushed forward as aggressively as we could. I sent over 2000 outbound emails in the first 60 days to connect with local businesses that we could work with. This was in the midst of the Covid shut down and it was difficult to get in front of people to make introductions. We were fortunate to book a few weeks of site work at a time early on to keep our bills paid and all of us fed. We weren’t earning much, but we also didn’t have many expenses yet. We were doing most of our work from the kitchen table in my small duplex apartment I was renting in Clintonville.
We were fortunate to have some friends and family who felt inclined to offer investment. Between nearly a dozen individuals who had watched our journey through the turbulent years leading up to starting Yellow Weld, we were given over $30,000. It was humbling to see this amount of money offered to our vision, $1000 at a time by other hard working people just getting by. We wrote up formal contracts, gave them generous interest returns, and were fortunate enough to receive investment renewals early on that allowed us to continue using these funds to grow. We never did any fundraising and I’m not sure we would have made it through the early days if others hadn’t offered their help.
Any advice for managing a team?
Managing people is one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn to do over the last few years. I always thought I was a good communicator, and it wasn’t until I had to keep so many people in alignment and keep everyone’s needs met that I really knew how challenging that could be. I learned that communicating too much could be just as troublesome as not communicating enough. I learned that though I value everyone’s opinion, opening decisions to the team often just consumed a lot of time and energy and at the end of the day, my team just wanted me to do what I believed was best. I made many things difficult because I thought it was the right thing to do, but I have learned over time that my team trusts me to make hard choices, and I need to trust that my team will follow me through the ups and downs as we find our footing and become established.
Culture is everything. Everyone talks about it now but I’m not sure many really understand what it is or how to build it. I think most people have worked for businesses who self describe as “family” but only embody the disfunction and chaos that a family often comes with. Businesses have struggled to keep the needs and wants of their team in focus as they manage the many difficult choices in their businesses, and in the end they pay gravely for being out of touch. My team today is the best team I have ever been a part of, and it gets better every day. We eat together. We talk about life. We share our favorite movies, animes, video games, podcasts, and books with each other. We welcome everyone to be their true selves and we accept them as they are. They give us so much in return for this gesture. The micro community we have built within our team is the strongest part of our business now. I am happy to say I enjoy coming to work every day and seeing each and everyone that plays a role in the business.
Contact Info:
- Website: yellowweld.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/yellowweld/
- Facebook: facebook.com/YellowWeld
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/davidbullivantyw/
Image Credits
Photos taken by our team, Collins Laatsch and Marina Carey