We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ihsan Al-Amīn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ihsan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience an industry-wide U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.
Yes, a huge u-turn has taken place in the industry. From real estate being a sellers market to the construction and materials needed to build more homes being on back order. The major shift started during covid-19 where materials weren’t being delivered causing items needed for builds and trim outs to be delayed by weeks and sometimes even months. I’ve experienced this shift on multiple occasions down to the trades we use. It’s been a difficult time for everyone apart of the industry, and most contractors who sub their work out has witnessed the shift as well.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My interest in construction began quite young. I watched my parents purchase properties in my hometown and fix them up for long term holds (rentals). The interest continued to grow, but I wanted to get more hands on experience in the pre-development side of things due to understanding most developers/construction companies weren’t going to hire someone like me with little to no experience. It was am extremely difficult road, but I was able to land an opportunity as a construction materials tester for an engineering firm. I was able to be apart of the new subdivisions being built, and ultimately inspecting the materials being used on multiple job sites. I learned so much, but I wasn’t done there. I began to look at opportunities for assistant project managers after 6 months of employment with the firm. I received a lot of “no’s” and quite a few “I’m sorry but’s..”. I didn’t give up though, I remained persistent and finally landed my first salary position as a green construction manager on the multifamily renovation side of the industry. After a 2 months, I fell in love with the process and systems I was able to come across and learn, but renovations wasn’t my passion, becoming a builder and developer was. After closing out multiple projects and a year and half later I landed my current role as an assistant builder with a local private company who has a small but mighty approach to the industry.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
My advice for managing a team and maintaining high morale is be personable. You are managing people, not robots. When you understand that you need to display grace, and patience you’ll be in a great position to lead. Also, when they see you performing duties that are outside of your description to get the job done, your team will respect you, and want to perform and come through for you when you need it the most. “Team work makes the dream work”.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
From being completing green in project management, I was able to remain resilient by constant prayer and literally not taking no for answer. For every no I received, I would submit 50 more applications until I heard a yes.