As I reflect on nearly 16 years of building All Nation Restoration here in Austin, Texas, there’s one lesson that took me far too long to learn something that might be obvious to others, but wasn’t to me in the early years.
Like many business owners, I set clear goals, profit targets, revenue milestones, hiring benchmarks. I believed deeply in the hustle. And as the company began to grow and we took on more work, my go-to solution for getting things done was simple: overtime.
In my mind, overtime was justified in two key ways:
So for a while, we leaned on it heavily. It felt like a win-win.
But it wasn’t.
After a few years, I started to notice something troubling: the same employees who were working long hours and cashing big checks were becoming… unhappy. Some were burnt out. Some were irritable. Some just quit.
At first, I didn’t get it. These were guys making serious money. Some had just bought new trucks, motorcycles, even leased downtown apartments. From the outside, they looked like they were winning.
But I began to realize something deeper was happening.
When you offer a young worker the chance to work 60, 70, even 80 hours a week, it’s hard for them to say no. It feels like an opportunity. But as time passes, those long weeks become a way of life. And that big check becomes a trap.
I watched it happen: truck payments, apartment leases, new gadgets all based on inflated paychecks padded by overtime. Many of these employees didn’t fully understand the long-term cost of interest rates, maintenance, insurance, or budgeting for the unexpected. All they knew was that they got approved. They were told “yes.”
And then they were stuck.
They had to keep working 60–80 hours a week just to survive. Not to thrive. Just to keep their heads above water.
One young guy once told me flat out:
“Ben, I just hate my life.”
I was shocked. This was a guy who, on paper, had it all…brand new truck, downtown apartment, riding a motorcycle to work, and a great paycheck. But he was trapped. He had built a life he could only afford by working himself to the bone. And he wasn’t alone. Another team member once told me:
“I have all these nice things that I never even get to enjoy. I work to live and live to work. This just isn’t the life I want.”
That’s when it really hit me: Overtime wasn’t helping these guys. It was hurting them.
And the damage didn’t stop with the employees, it extended to the business itself.
When you pay someone time-and-a-half after 40 hours, you’re paying premium rates for their lowest-quality work. Every additional hour produces diminishing returns. They’re tired. They’re burned out. Mistakes happen. Even worse, you’re eating up the capital that could have been used to hire more people, build better systems, and create pathways to management.
Relying on overtime as a growth strategy slows your ability to grow the team. It limits the internal career ladder. You can’t promote to estimator or quality control roles if no one is being hired beneath the team doing the overtime. You lose the future while trying to catch up with the present.
These days, when I think about our next growth spurt, I don’t think about squeezing more hours out of the people we have. I think about staffing. Training. Creating room for leadership to emerge.
I look inside our organization for the right people to promote into oversight roles. That creates opportunity. That keeps morale up. That gives employees room to rest, build a life outside of work, and come back energized not trapped.
By reducing the reliance on overtime, we’ve reduced the number of employees who feel overcommitted, exhausted, and buried in debt. And more importantly, we’ve created an environment that supports long-term growth not just for the company, but for the people building it alongside me. Growth isn’t just about what you build it’s about how you build it. And sometimes, what feels like the fastest path forward can quietly become the biggest trap of all.
If you’re leaning on overtime as your strategy for scaling, take a step back. Talk to your team. Look at their lives. Look at your margins. Ask yourself if the treadmill is still moving in the direction you want to go or if you’re just running in place.
Because in the long run, the real growth happens when your team grows with you.
Stay Strong. Stay Focused. Stay in Business.
