There’s a temptation when somebody reaches the top of a business to make their career look inevitable. The promotions line up neatly. Each decision appears calculated, and every move seems to have been part of a plan.
Gary Bonacich’s story is messier, and more useful.
The president and CEO of Resource, the company behind Scaffold Resource and Reach Services, started around scaffolding almost by accident of birth. His father joined Safway in 1978 after emigrating from Croatia to the United States, and Bonacich grew up sweeping warehouse floors before joining the trade himself as a union carpenter.
What followed was a long way round to the boardroom. There were career changes, big financial sacrifices, moves away from comfortable positions and, by his own admission, plenty of moments when he wondered whether he was ready for what came next.
That’s why the latest episode of The Brace Yourself Podcast is worth a listen. It’s a story about what happens when practical scaffolding experience meets a willingness to take risks, listen to people and build a business around something competitors can’t just buy.
Sometimes the biggest move is backwards financially
After around nine years on the tools, Bonacich was earning well and running significant work. Then came a chance to leave that comfortable position and work at Drexel University while continuing his education.
Financially, it made very little sense in the short term. Asked how big the pay cut was, Bonacich puts it at around 60 per cent. He had a house, a family and all the usual bills that make staying put considerably easier than starting again.
His reasoning is probably the strongest lesson in the episode. Doing what’s comfortable is easy. At some point, progression means betting on yourself.
It happened again when Safway later asked him to relocate and take responsibility for its Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland and Delaware operations.
His first reaction was fear.
He talks openly about wondering whether he was ready, what would happen if he failed and whether another opportunity would ever come if he turned it down. He took it anyway.
It’s refreshing to hear someone now running a 500-person business admit he was terrified walking into a management job. Too often, leadership stories get rewritten after the event to remove that uncertainty.
Anybody can buy scaffolding
As the conversation goes on, Bonacich keeps coming back to people. That can easily become corporate shorthand. Almost every company says its people are its greatest asset. Bonacich puts it more bluntly:
“Anybody can buy scaffolding.”
The difference, he argues, is the people who estimate it, design it, organise it, transport it, build it, manage the customer and solve the problems around it. Or, as Bonacich prefers to call them, the situations.
“There are never problems. There are only situations.”
It sounds simple, but there’s a useful leadership point behind it. Treat every setback as a crisis and you create unnecessary heat inside a business. Experience teaches you to slow down, understand the situation and find the next move.
He also talks candidly about learning to listen. Earlier in his career, Bonacich says, he was sometimes just waiting for his turn to speak. That matters when a leader claims to run a people-first business. You can’t tell employees their views matter while you’re mentally preparing your answer before they’ve finished talking.
A lesson from his father that stuck
The simplest rule in the episode came from Bonacich’s father.
“Never ask anyone to do anything that you wouldn’t do yourself.”
Bonacich says the advice has stayed with him from his time on the tools through to running Resource today. It’s about respect. In scaffolding, it’s also about safety.
If a manager wouldn’t be comfortable doing the task they’re asking of somebody else, there’s probably a conversation that needs to happen before work carries on. So practical experience still counts long after somebody leaves the tools. It tells a leader what a decision made in an office might actually mean to the person carrying it out on site.
Growth needs a bigger bench
Resource itself takes up the second half of the episode. The business now employs around 450 to 500 people, covering ground-based access through Scaffold Resource and suspended access through Reach Services.
Bonacich describes strong growth in recent years. The more interesting part is how he says the business prepared for it. Before asking sales for more work, Resource checked whether the rest of the organisation could support it. Sales, operations, admin, the yard and management all had to grow together.
Bonacich calls it building a “bigger bench”. Plenty of expanding contractors will recognise that. Winning another job is relatively easy. Delivering ten more without damaging the service that won the customer in the first place is the hard bit.
Growth gets dangerous when turnover expands faster than the structure holding it up.
The scaffold yard is a logistics business
Bonacich reckons the yard gets far less attention than design software or new products. He argues scaffolding companies should take logistics much more seriously, because scaffold components spend relatively little of their life being erected or dismantled. Most of the time they’re being stored, counted, loaded, transported, returned and sorted.
“It spends the rest of its life getting moved around.”
His view is that failing to put proper emphasis on the logistics behind a scaffolding operation is short-sighted. Resource’s yard was laid out with engineering input and has kept changing as the company has grown. The business has moved from one shift to two and keeps adjusting its processes around how material actually flows through the operation.
It’s the unglamorous end of scaffolding, and poor logistics can quickly wipe out the margin you made on good estimating and productive scaffolders.
Preconstruction as a competitive advantage
If there’s one operational lesson Bonacich keeps coming back to, it’s preconstruction. He describes Resource’s preconstruction and design team as one of the company’s biggest differentiators.
The team works alongside sales before a project reaches site, taking the customer’s requirement and developing the solution in detail. That means working out how materials will move, how loads will be carried, how the customer will use the access and whether the whole concept works before anybody starts erecting it.
The episode shows that approach through Resource’s work on the Louisiana State Capitol, the tallest state capitol building in the United States. The restoration was an unusual job. Individual stones weighing up to around 3,000lb (about 1,360kg) had to be removed and restored, and the scaffold loads couldn’t simply be transferred into parts of the existing building below.
The solution came together in stages. It started with basic sketches, moved into proof-of-concept layouts and engineering, then bespoke steelwork and material-handling studies, and finally full 3D modelling. Resource even built a full-size mock-up at its yard to test the trolley arrangement before the real scaffold went up.
That might sound excessive. Then think about finding out the material-handling plan doesn’t work once thousands of components and bespoke steelwork are already hundreds of feet in the air.
Good planning costs money. Bad planning costs considerably more.
The editor’s take
For me, the strongest part of this episode is that Bonacich’s career and Resource’s approach to projects tell the same story. Both are about doing the difficult work before you need the result.
He took the pay cut before the opportunity appeared. Resource built its bench before chasing turnover, and designed the material route on the Capitol before a single tube went up.
There’s also a useful challenge here for an industry that sometimes leans too hard on either practical experience or management expertise. Bonacich’s career suggests the real value comes from combining the two. A good scaffolder still has to learn to lead. Understanding the tools, then learning to listen, delegate and develop people, is a powerful combination.
