When RJ McElroy drives through downtown Richwood, he sees his résumé.
The job he did on a storefront three winters ago. The trim on a building he repainted twice because the first owner liked the color and then the second owner liked a different one. The exterior of a family business whose owner offered him advertising space on the side of the wall, free, because the work had spoken for itself. About half the businesses on the main strip have at one point or another hired him. He is thirty-nine years old, born here, raised here, and the relationship he has with his hometown is one most contractors would describe as inseparable from the business itself.
McElroy did not always own the company. He worked the trade for sixteen years, a stretch of them inside Union Local 1275 in Columbus, where he ran commercial projects on a scale that taught him how a job site is actually managed. The union work was a graduate school in execution. You learn budgets. You learn pace. You learn how to talk to a project manager who is having a worse day than you are. He liked the structure. He was good at it. He probably could have stayed.
The voices that pulled him out of it were not foremen. They were business owners. Other people who had once been him, who had stood on his side of a ladder, and who had eventually asked the question he was not yet asking himself. Why are you doing this for someone else? He stayed inside that question for a long time. About six years ago, he stepped out of it. He started McElroy Painting and Epoxies LLC. He kept his standards. He swapped the security of the union for the responsibility of his own name on the invoice.
