For six weeks after Hurricane Michael, Garrett Anderson ran a general contracting company with no cell service, no phone service, and no power. Every night, one of his employees drove north with ten five-gallon gas cans and brought them back full by morning. Garrett fired up a grill outside the office and cooked breakfast, and sometimes lunch, because every restaurant and most of the supermarkets in Bay County were closed. His team would check in at the office like a base camp, head back out to help homeowners, and return. When owners stopped by needing help, someone wrote their name on a list so a damage assessment could be scheduled.

It worked. Anderson Construction got its community back on its feet through the most devastating storm in the region’s history. But it worked because Garrett willed it to, and that is exactly the problem this story is about.

Because long before the storm, and long after it, there was a ceiling over the company that no amount of effort could break. Garrett could feel it every day. He just couldn’t push through it by working harder, and for a long time working harder was the only tool he had.

He Was Winning. He Was Also the Bottleneck.

Garrett grew up in Panama City, studied at the University of Florida, and spent a decade building through the Atlanta boom before opening his own firm back home in 2003. By any outside measure he was succeeding. But ask him whether he ever had the moment where he realized he’d built a job instead of a business, and the answer is immediate: that wasn’t a moment, it was a daily one.

He describes it plainly.

He suspects plenty of owners know the exact feeling. No matter how many hours he put in, an invisible glass ceiling hung over the business, and more effort never seemed to raise it.

Hurricane Michael came ashore as a Category 5 in October 2018 and took Bay County apart. Before the storm, Anderson Construction was running roughly ten to twelve million dollars a year. Overnight, Garrett was operating in a community with no power and no communications, trying to get homeowners back into their houses and keep essential commercial work moving, including at the local hospital, while his own family and team were living through the same disaster.

The response was heroic, and it was almost entirely manual. Gas cans and a grill. Divide and conquer. Names on a list. It is the purest possible illustration of a company running on one person’s shoulders, and it is genuinely impressive that it held.

But a storm like Michael doesn’t just test a company. It floods the market with work and out-of-state competitors, and it sends demand vertical. The very thing that let Garrett survive the storm, being personally involved in everything, was the thing most likely to break as the company tried to scale into the boom that followed.

Maintenance Before the Equipment Breaks

Garrett had quietly wanted a business coach for a while, but a specific kind: someone who understood construction. He hadn’t found one, and hadn’t looked all that hard, until SBGP crossed his radar and hit the exact itch he’d been sitting with. As a sole proprietor, he describes being “out on the island on your own” with plenty of ideas and no one to test them against. He wanted someone to bounce thinking off of, to bring clarity to the fuzzy parts, and to sharpen the business.

The way he frames the decision is telling for a builder. He didn’t see it as fixing something broken. He saw it as maintenance, and his line captures it perfectly: you don’t want your equipment to be broken before you perform maintenance on it. Getting through that glass ceiling, he decided, was worth another tool in the toolbox.

The BPA itself was intimidating at first. Handing over financials and opening the business up to scrutiny is uncomfortable, and Garrett admits he didn’t know whether he’d get useful feedback or simply be told he was beyond help. What settled him was getting to know the team and realizing they were genuinely there to help him. Once the anxiety and the natural question of whether it would pay off had eased, he made peace with it and moved forward.

Then came the coaching, and the part good coaching always eventually reaches: the thing you’ve been avoiding. For Garrett, that was accountability. His coach, Brian, was quick to read his strengths and weaknesses, and the weakness was clear to both of them. Human resources, developing his people, and holding them accountable when sensitive timelines slipped had always been his biggest hurdle. Brian helped him fine-tune his employee handbook, get his expectations in writing, and actually hold the line when deadlines were at risk. Garrett is blunt about the prerequisite for any of it working: you have to want to be coached, and you have to bring some self-awareness to the table.

SBGP conducts a full diagnostic across the seven disciplines of your business, including DISC and motivational profiles on you and your key people, and builds a step-by-step 12-month plan, so the parts of the business you’ve been avoiding become the parts that finally get fixed.

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From Firefighting to a Company That Runs Without Him

The changes that followed were the unglamorous, load-bearing kind. Standard operating procedures. Clear roles and responsibilities. Three-to-five-year strategic planning where there had been reaction. Meaningful KPIs for Garrett and his staff, and the discipline to actually hold people to them. None of it is flashy, and all of it is exactly what dissolves a glass ceiling, because each piece takes something that used to live only in the owner’s head and turns it into something the team can run on its own.

The payoff was time out of the building. By bringing people on, handing them real responsibility, and lightening his own load, Garrett could finally step out from behind the desk, and the company kept working while he did. That freed him to pour energy into the organizations that matter to him, including the Florida Home Builders Association, his local BBIA, and the Chamber of Commerce, and even to help coach his son’s soccer team. In hindsight, he says, being out of the office is part of what let the company grow, because it gave his employees the room to grow into.

The scale that followed is the real proof. In 2021 Anderson Construction made the UF Gator 100, one of the fastest-growing Gator-led businesses in the world. That kind of post-disaster growth is precisely what breaks companies, costing them their quality, their margins, or their people. Anderson Construction grew that fast and kept the wheels on, because by then the ideas Garrett had been carrying around for years finally had a structure to live in, and they were working.

For the Builder Who’s Winning and Still Carrying It All

Somewhere there’s a builder who sees himself in Garrett: respected, licensed to the hilt, doing great work, and privately carrying far more of the company on his own back than he’d ever admit. The assumption that coaching is only for companies that are struggling is exactly the trap, because Garrett was already winning Builder of the Year before any of this.

His advice to that builder is practical and honest. Talk to SBGP and ask specifically about the kind of coaches they have. Be fully transparent about where you think your weaknesses are, so they can actually help. And go in ready to put the hours in, because that’s what turns it into a return.

In Garrett’s own summary, it has been a fantastic and successful venture, and well worth the return he’s seen from it.