Books to Grow On

Charlie Gindele wants everyone in the building industry to find their success

Like many people in the construction industry, Charlie Gindele got his start trailing his father on building sites. Nearly 60 years later, Gindele, now retired and acting as a coach and mentor for CCN members, has written two books — the memoir Build it to Last and Lessons Learned, My Journey from Contractor to Businessman — that he hopes will “help contractors speed their learning curve and avoid making some of the same mistakes” he did.

Getting Started

“When you’re younger,” Gindele says, “you’re trying to figure out what’s important to you and where you want to go in life. You try different things, but there’s a point in your life when you start to say, ‘I found my niche. I found what I was cut out to do.’ It feels good.” That happened for Gindele in the early 2000s. But way before he got there, he went to college then started his own roofing, siding, window, and door business in the Philadelphia area, where he had grown up. Within three years, he had gotten married and had a child “and became very conscious of being more secure,” he says. He saw his college friends moving up the corporate ladder and he thought that was where he needed to be.

He took a job with the manufacturer Alcoa Building Products, a “’real’ job with benefits,” he says, and did a lot of traveling away from home. In 1983, the company restructured and sent him to Western Ohio. In 1984, he tired of that, resigned and started a residential roofing business in Orange County, California, a place he’d gotten to know during his traveling years. “I was 30 years old and didn’t know anyone there, but I thought the market was right for what I wanted to do,” he says.

Determined to Succeed

Somehow, his product and installation knowledge got him through — to a point. Within about five years he was one of the largest Alcoa aluminum roofing dealers in the U.S. Then he started a window replacement division. It took a decade before he started “making a living,” he says. “I didn’t run my business by the numbers. I did it by cash flow, how much was in the checkbook. Not with a lot of planning and foresight. I was doing a good job for customers and employees but maybe not for myself. I didn’t focus on the profitability part of the business. You could say I confused activity with productivity.”

This last lesson is the step Gindele wants readers to learn from so that they can move into profitability more quickly and with more confidence. Lessons Learned, in particular, offers explanations and hands-on advice about profit and loss; owner’s equity; budgeting; getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus; improving the customer experience; growing a business and more.

In 1995, after about a decade in business, Gindele attended a two-day CCN session. “I was doing about $5 million a year and had 25 employees. I felt like I was doing okay but I realized I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was humbled.” That’s when things began to really turn around. He committed himself to making changes. For the next 15 years he worked hard creating action steps, strategies, budgets, written goals and objectives. He became more than a business owner. He became a leader. Ultimately, in 2019, his company did $48 million in business and he sold the company to Andersen Corp., where he stayed on as general manager for three years before he retired at the end of 2021. Once he had time on his hands, Gindele put it to good use. As he says, the books offer lessons about “things I wish someone had told me when I was 25. As they say, ‘The teacher appears when the student is ready.’ This is my way of giving back to the industry.”