By Heather Whitley
At age 13, Isaac Lidsky starred in a ’90s teen sitcom. By age 15, he enrolled at Harvard University. When he was 20, he founded an Internet company. Five years later, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Lidsky then clerked for Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He got married, had triplets and bought a struggling construction company that he has now turned into a thriving, multimillion-dollar business. It’s an impressive resume for someone who is still under 40. But perhaps even more impressive when you discover Isaac Lidsky is blind.
In 1993, shortly after Lidsky landed the role of a brainiac kid on a popular sitcom, he found out he had retinitis pigmentosa, a rare blinding disease that would slowly rob him of his sight.
“As my retina slowly deteriorated and I had all of these bizarre visual effects, I realized that far from reality, sight is an experience that is masterly constructed by the brain,” said Lidsky. “And each of us is empowered to take accountability for and take control and ownership of the reality we want for ourselves.”
A New Reality
By 2010, now fully blind and having served as a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and a Supreme Court clerk, Lidsky earned himself a spot at a large international law firm in London. But something was still missing.
The practice of billing clients as many hours as possible to earn money for the firm didn’t sit well with Lidsky. And when he and his wife, Dorothy, found themselves spending night and day in the neonatal intensive care unit with their newborn triplets, Lidsky was shocked at the lack of support and understanding from his firm. It was time to make a change.
Lidsky left the law firm and in 2011, with the monetary and moral support of a friend who worked in finance, he bought Orlando Decorative Concrete, a small subcontracting company in Florida.
But within months of closing the deal, Lidsky discovered that the data he and his partner had analyzed so meticulously was, in his words, “garbage.” Their newly acquired company was hemorrhaging money. “We didn’t necessarily want a turnaround situation,” admitted Lidsky. “But that’s what we got.”
Lidsky’s first step was to approach their largest client and request a price increase. Next, he met with their second-largest customer, which accounted for one quarter of his company’s revenue. When the client wouldn’t budge, Lidsky made the tough decision to walk away. Step three was an aggressive effort to bring in new business. It made for extremely long workdays at a time when Lidsky couldn’t even afford to bring home a paycheck. He said it resulted in some serious discussions with his family.
“We were talking about how we might have to go through a personal bankruptcy, how we might lose the business. We had a conversation with her parents, who live here in Orlando, as to whether we could move in with them with our one-year-old triplets,” Lidsky said. “It was pretty ugly.”
The Secret Weapon
Despite the grim situation Lidsky and his partner were in, they knew there was still opportunity for success.
“Our vision was great, our strategy was great, our timing was great; we just had a much rougher start at it than we had anticipated,” Lidsky said. “Because of how desperate we were, and how extreme the turnaround situation was, we got very good at managing the cash flow dynamics of our business, which ultimately became our secret weapon.”
It boiled down to two things: getting paid more quickly and paying out more slowly. In order to make those things happen, Lidsky knew they had to have some frank conversations with their clients.
“I’m all for the open and honest and direct approach, so we were not embarrassed to sit down with big, top customers and say, ‘Look, you’re growing, we’re growing, we like doing business together; we want to do more of it.’” Lidsky said. “And if you want this gravy train to keep rolling, we need your help.”
The strategy worked. ODC Construction is now a full-service and logistics construction company whose revenues have grown from roughly $20 million in 2011 to more than $80 million in 2015. ODC is expected to pull in revenues of about $130 million this year, and is on track to build nearly 3,500 homes. What started as a company with about a dozen employees and 100 labor workers now has 83 corporate employees and 300 on the labor side.
Today, Lidsky is spending more time sharing his story and insights with others through public speaking and a book titled Eyes Wide Open, which is due to hit stores later this year.
“Slowly losing sight the way I did over time was a profound blessing in my life,” Lidsky said. “It was the peek behind the curtains, so to speak, that led me to understand in a deep and visceral way how we truly create our own realities.”
Heather Whitley is a senior-level writer and producer with a passion for storytelling. She has produced a wide variety of content for both television networks and digital platforms around the globe. Her work has been featured on multiple shows on CNN as well as ABC’s 20/20 and Gannett Digital’s websites.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.forbes.com/sites/capitalonespark/2016/05/23/cash-flow-is-key-how-one-ceo-turned-a-bad-deal-into-a-multimillion-dollar-construction-company/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=475380378&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbes&linkId=24792483#685d03dd776c
