Dirk van der Velde

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377 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dirk van der Velde’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Builders, Budgets, and Beers · When Your Systems Don’t Match Your Strategy with Dirk van der Velde · 28 May 2025 podcast

And construction was really the only thing I had much experience in, was really the only thing I saw opportunity in.

But my skills were pretty low, to be real with you.

right i mean it's one thing to have been a part of building something it's another thing to now have to really lead the entire experience you have to if you're gonna run a business it's not just having one skill you have to be a generalist in each component you have to be good at marketing at operations at the finance side you have to understand how to put like bring together a team right there's many components that you have to learn and

I would say when we first started it, just like anything you go from, I was working at W2.

Now we started our own thing.

And interestingly enough, when you first start your own thing, now you're not capped by a W2.

So at first you're making more money than you'd experienced, right?

So you're making more money than you'd ever had, but you're also burned.

It's like a self-employed wild situation.

You're hitting full burnout because you have to wear every single hat.

And so we went through that classic thing where, okay, sure, we're making more money, but

i'm hitting i'm working more hours and hitting level like this isn't sustainable then we went through the cycle of okay now we finally have enough jobs to where we can have some people come in and support but i didn't have clarity on culture so we went through two cycles which was all my fault where i just took anyone who was willing to help me right anyone that was willing to help i was going to bring men we were good to go and i wasn't a good leader i didn't have a good understanding of

what we needed i didn't have a good understanding of what cultural fit needed to happen and so i went through two cycles which is very costly right if you don't have clarity one of the lessons i'm trying to point it there is before you go and just react i think a lot of entrepreneurs will quickly react i need this and they'll just quickly react

A key thing I'm learning as I'm getting a little bit older and a little bit smarter is clarity is the most important thing.

So once I went through two cycles because I didn't have clarity on what I needed and what culture, what kind of culture we were going to have.

So clarity is one of the key components.

And once we finally had that after two cycles, we started attracting employees and we started being able to say, OK, hey.

You know, now I got clarity on the culture.

Now I can attract the right people into the culture.

And that started to unlock some capacity.

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