An ESTP man is worth more per hour than anyone in the building and less per year than the arithmetic suggests, because what he has only exists while the thing is happening and never compounds. Faced with a man like that, a company reaches for the one lever that also works by the event, and the lever is money, and money settles the question every year without ever settling it.
The first time I went out on a loss with Tate Kovach it was a sprinkler head in a four-storey medical building at two in the morning, and he was through the lobby and up the stairwell before I had my shoes on properly.
I caught him on the third floor with a flashlight in his teeth, pulling a ceiling tile.
“How bad,” I said.
“It’s fine on three. Two’s the problem.”
I said the water was coming down through three.
“Water’s coming through three.” He put the tile back. “It’s sitting in two. There’s a floor assembly there that isn’t in the drawings and it’s holding about an inch of standing water over about nine hundred square feet, and if we cut the wrong side of that ceiling at seven in the morning with the building open we’re going to put it on somebody.”
We were on two by two-fifteen. We cut where he said. The building’s facilities man arrived at six and asked how we’d known, and Tate told him about a smell.
Tate came to Brannock in 1996 as a technician. He was twenty-two, out of a year and a half of community college and two years of framing houses. He is a wide, fast-moving man who has never worn a coat he could not work in. He is genuinely funny and he uses it, and it is not a performance, and it also gets him out of about a third of the conversations he does not want to have. He does not sit down in an office; he stands, or he leans on the doorframe, or he takes the meeting in the parking lot. I have not seen him read a document longer than a page, in thirty years.
Brannock Restoration & Reconstruction is in Selby and does water, fire, and storm losses across most of this half of the state — homeowners, commercial, and program work for three carriers. Thane Brannock started it in 1979 with a van and a truck-mounted extractor. His son Beck has run it since 2014. We are ninety-one people in a mild year and two hundred and something in a bad one.
I came in 1998 as the controller and I have been the chief financial officer since 2010, which means that for twenty-eight years I have written every compensation plan this company has issued, including his, including all of them.
Here is the sentence Thane used about Tate Kovach, and Beck uses it now, and I have used it in a room where using it settled something.
Nobody’s ever had to worry about Tate. He’s out-earned me six years out of ten.
The transition documents went to the buyer’s counsel last week. There is a schedule in there called key employees, and it lists nine people, and Tate’s number is the largest on it and his retention agreement is the shortest, and I built both of those and I have not managed to look at that page since.
Still Happening
The thing people outside this trade do not understand is that a loss is a process rather than an object, and that it is running while you look at it.
Water does not sit where it landed. It wicks up drywall at something like an inch an hour for the first day. It travels along the bottom plate under a wall and comes out three rooms away. It gets under tack strip and into the subfloor and then into the joist ends where nobody will find it until the flooring cups in six weeks. Every hour you spend deciding is an hour the job gets bigger, and the difference between a nine-thousand-dollar mitigation and a sixty-thousand-dollar reconstruction is very often a decision somebody made in the first four hours, in a building, in the dark, on incomplete information.
That decision does not survive into anything. The scope of work we bill from is a list of line items in the carrier’s platform, and it looks exactly like the scope of work from a job where nobody made a good decision at all.
Two of the twenty-one years he has been on commission were catastrophe years, and a catastrophe year in this trade is not a busy season, it is a different business. You put crews in motel rooms in another county for nine weeks. You buy equipment you will not need again for six years. Your receivables go somewhere you have never seen them go. Everybody in this office has a story about 2011 and nobody has one about 2014, and 2014 was a perfectly good year in which we made money and nothing whatever happened.
We do not say the Q word in this building. Nobody says it and everybody knows what it is and the newest person on the phones learns it in the first week from somebody who will not explain why, and when a project manager said it into a headset in 2019 during the flattest stretch this company had seen in a decade, two people got up and left the room.
I raise Rhode Island Reds and show them, badly, at three fairs a year, and I have a wall of fourth-place ribbons and one second that I got in a class with two birds in it.
The First Ninety Seconds
Ardella Ashcraft’s husband had died in the spring and the supply line under her kitchen sink let go in the autumn, and by the time we got there the water had been running for most of a day and a half.
She met us at the door and started apologizing.
I have watched perhaps two hundred estimators walk into a house like that. What almost all of them do is take out a moisture meter.
What Tate did was ask her where she wanted to sit.
She said the front room, and he said the front room was wet, and she said she knew, and he pulled two chairs from the dining set out onto the porch and they sat on the porch for six or seven minutes, and I stood in the yard and I was, at the time, mildly annoyed about the clock.
Then he said, “Ma’am, I’m going to tell you the two things you’re worried about, and you tell me if I’ve got them wrong.”
She said all right.
“You’re worried we’re going to take the floor up and it’s not going to match, and you’re worried this is going to cost you money you weren’t planning on.”
She started crying, which is what people do when somebody says the true thing out loud.
He did the whole job in his head in about twenty minutes after that. He saved the floor, which two other estimators in this company would not have tried, because he read the species and the finish and the fact that it had been down since 1974 and made a call about how it would come back. It came back. He also knew, before he had a meter on anything, that the sill plate on the north wall was involved, and it was.
The reconstruction ran nine weeks and she called the office twice, both times to ask about the same tech by name.
When it closed out he stopped by. I know because she wrote a letter, and the letter went in a frame in the front hall, and the letter says that a young man came back after the work was done to check the floor.
He was forty-five. She meant it kindly.
Marlow Danner has done exactly that for us since 2009 and is, in my opinion, better with a homeowner than he is. What Marlow gets called is wonderful with our customers, in the tone people reserve for nice handwriting. Nobody has ever built a compensation plan around Marlow’s twenty minutes. What the identical twenty minutes earns a woman in this line of work, and what she is expected to do with the other seven hours of her day, is added up separately.
Ninety-one people. Two of the seven in field leadership are women. I have signed every offer letter this company has issued since 1998.
Marlow asked me in 2021 what it would take to get on a plan like Tate’s.
I gave her the honest answer, which is that his plan sits on large-loss overrides and she does not get put on large losses.
“Right,” she said. “So what would it take.”
Take Care of Him
The compensation history is thirty pages and I could recite it.
He went on a commission structure in 2001. In 2004 we invented a role for him called large loss coordinator, which was not a promotion in any structural sense — no reports, no budget — and which came with an override on any job over a certain size. In 2008 I built him a bonus tied to gross margin on large losses because the override was making him rich in a way the field could see. In 2011, which was a hail year, he made more than Thane. In 2013 I rebuilt the whole thing again because the 2011 number had frightened the family.
That is the pattern and I did not see it as a pattern for about fifteen years. Every single time the question of what to do about Tate came up — and it came up perhaps eight times — the answer was a number.
It was not cynical, and that is the part that has to be honest here. He liked the number. He asked for the number. When I brought him the 2013 restructure, which lowered his ceiling and raised his floor, he read the first page and said, “Am I going to be all right?” and I said he was going to be fine, and he said, “Then it’s fine,” and asked if I wanted anything out of the machine.
Thane asked me that year whether we were ever going to give him something with a title on it.
I said he was the highest-paid person in the field organisation.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Thane said, and then he went to a job, and neither of us picked it up again, and Thane died in 2019.
In 2016 we created a regional operations seat. Four branches, a P and L, thirty-some people.
Beck asked me, in my office, door shut, whether Tate could run it.
I said he wouldn’t want it, and that it would be a pay cut in a good year, and that we would lose him to a competitor inside eighteen months.
Every word of that was true. Every word of it was also a way of not having a different conversation, which is whether a man who had been here twenty years and was the best field mind in this region could be taught to run four branches, and what it would take, and whether we owed him the attempt.
Cy Wendorf got the seat.
Beck called Tate that afternoon to tell him before the announcement, which was decent, and I heard our half of it.
“He’s good with it,” Beck said afterward.
I asked what he’d said.
“He said Cy’s the right call and asked if we’d looked at the Fairhaven branch’s drying equipment, because he thinks half of it’s junk.”
It was junk. We replaced it in the autumn.
Cy
Let me set down what actually happened to Tate in 2016, because at the time I would have told you nothing did.
He congratulated Cy. He meant it. He took Cy out to the two worst branches in the region and spent nine days walking jobs with him and handed over relationships he had built over a decade, and Cy will tell you that himself and has.
And then the following spring I gave him the largest single-year comp package this company has ever written.
He came into my office to sign it and he stood, the way he does, and he read the summary page, and he said something I put in a drawer for eight years.
“So this is instead of the other thing.”
I said it was a great package.
“It is,” he said. “I’m not complaining.” He signed it against the edge of my desk, standing up. “I just want to know if I’m allowed to ask again.”
I said of course he could ask again.
He never asked again.
And the next part is mine and I will not soften it. In 2019, at a leadership dinner with Beck and the branch managers and a carrier rep, somebody made a joke about Tate’s truck and about what he must be pulling down, and I said it warmly, to a laugh: that Tate had the best deal in the company, all of the money and none of the meetings.
He was four seats down. He laughed too. He has a good laugh and he used it.
I have thought since about what that sentence does when it is said by the person who writes the comp plans, at a table of the people who decide who gets what, about a man who had asked once, eighteen months earlier, whether he was allowed to ask again.
Flat Years
He is not the same man when nothing is happening and everybody at this company knows it and nobody has ever said it to him.
In a bad week he is late. He does the ride-alongs and the estimate reviews and he is fine at them and he is somewhere else. In thirty years he has not produced a written plan for anything. He was on our strategic planning committee in 2015 for one cycle and Beck moved him off it, gently, and the reason Beck gave me was that Tate’s contributions weren’t landing, and the true version is that Tate sat through two sessions about where the company would be in five years and said almost nothing and then made a joke that closed the second session down.
I came in one morning in the middle of that 2019 stretch and he was in the estimating room at nine, which is not where he is at nine, doing a review on somebody’s kitchen scope.
“How’s it look?”
“It’s fine.” He turned the monitor a little. “There’s four hundred dollars of tile in here that isn’t going to be needed and about nine hundred of something else that is, and if I fix both of them it nets out and everybody has a better morning.”
I said that sounded right.
He was still on the same file at eleven-thirty. There was nothing wrong with the file. I have never once seen him take that long on anything at a job site.
I asked him about it once, in the truck, coming back from a fire in the county.
“You didn’t have anything for that meeting?”
“I don’t know where we’re going to be in five years,” he said. “Neither does anybody in that room. They know where they’d like to be.”
I said that was sort of the point of it.
“Sure,” he said, and turned the radio up, and I have replayed that as him being dismissive and I now think it was closer to him telling me plainly that I had asked him for a thing he does not have.
The other half of it costs more. He has never built the kind of standing that goes on working while he is somewhere else. Cy has a monthly call, a distribution list, and people in the other branches who owe him favours. Tate has three hundred people in this industry who would drive half a day if he rang, and not one of them who thinks about him on an ordinary morning. He maintains nothing. He arrives.
I said something to him about that once, about staying in touch with the carrier people between claims.
“With what,” he said. “There’s nothing to say to them.”
The Verification
In the spring he came to my office with a form.
It was an employment verification for a lender, which happens perhaps forty times a year in a company this size and which normally goes to payroll, and he brought it to me, and I understood later that he brought it to me because he did not want it to go through payroll.
I asked what it was for.
“Refinancing,” he said. “Rate’s better.”
I filled it in. Then I did the thing I have been doing for twenty-eight years, which is look at a number, and the number on the second page was the loan balance, and it was a mortgage he took in 2007.
Nineteen years into a thirty-year note, on a house he bought before his best decade.
I went and ran his history that night, which I had every right to do and which was not why I did it. Base plus commission plus override plus bonus, 2004 to 2025. He has earned more money than anybody who has ever worked for this company except the family. He has no equity, because we never offered any. He has no deferred comp, because we never built one. He has the match on a plan he did not start contributing to until 2014. Two of the twenty-one years were catastrophic hail years and in those two years he made almost a third of the total.
That is what a curve looks like when you live on it. Two years carry the decade and the other eight are ordinary, and everybody in this trade knows that about the company and nobody in this trade ever says it about a person.
The money never worked as a substitute for a career. It was the same event-shaped thing his work is, paid out event by event, and it went the way event-shaped money goes.
I put the form in an envelope and gave it to him and said the rate looked good.
The Badge
Our carrier network runs a conference every year in a hotel with a lazy river.
In 2018 they did an icebreaker. Everybody filled out a short instrument at registration and the letters got printed on the badge under your name, with a coloured lanyard to match, and the idea was that you could see across a ballroom what you were walking toward.
Tate wore his for three days and told at least eleven people it was his beer preference.
His badge said ESTP.
Mine is in a box in my basement with the conference workbook, which is the one part of that weekend that had any content in it, and I dug it out in the spring after the verification form. There is an appendix nobody reads. It explains that the letters compress a ranking: the habit carrying the freight, the one it runs out through, and two at the tail that come to a person only when he decides to reach for them, slowly, and badly under pressure. Where each habit falls in this case is spelled out under the type’s own heading, drawn from the sixteen the conference was printing off.
What carries the load for him is the live situation itself. No stored model of buildings, and no forecast of the job’s ending — the actual thing in front of him, at full resolution, changing while he looks at it. He read Ardella Ashcraft’s face and the age of her floor and the sound of the building and the fact that the water had been running a day and a half, all at once, and none of that was retrieval and none of it was prediction.
And here is the property of that faculty that decided his whole working life. It only exists while the thing is happening. You cannot run it in advance. You cannot run it afterward. It produces no plan, because a plan is made in a quiet room, and it produces no report, because by the time you are writing the report the inputs are gone. There is nothing to schedule and nothing to file and nothing to hand to a successor.
The second habit is what he does with what he is reading, which is a fast, private, entirely real analysis. He is not guessing. Ask him inside the hour and he will give you the reasoning in order, and he did, on the third floor of that medical building, in about nine seconds. Ask him a week later and he cannot reconstruct it, because what he was reasoning from is not there anymore.
And the two at the tail of his ranking are the two a promotion is made of. One is a coherent account of where something ends up over years — which is the entire content of a regional seat and the entire content of a five-year planning session. The other is the maintenance of a standing that operates in his absence: the call, the list, the relationships tended when nothing is on fire. He does not have either, and he knows he does not have either, and he told me so in a truck in 2015 and I heard a man being flip.
So the sentence about him is true. He was worth more per hour than anyone in this company and less per year than the arithmetic suggests, because what he has does not compound. Every loss starts at zero. And a business faced with a man like that reaches for the one lever that also works by the event, which is cash, and cash settles it every single year without settling it once.
The plain part, since I am the person who wrote the plans. If your compensation is mostly variable and the plan can be rewritten each year at the company’s discretion, that is a contract question and it is worth having somebody look at it in a good year rather than after a bad one — and if a company has taken care of you for two decades without ever offering equity, deferred compensation, or a title with a budget under it, that is a fact about the company’s intentions and not about your value. And this trade in particular: if anybody leans on you to widen a scope on a homeowner who is standing in three inches of water, that is not aggressive estimating, it has a name and the carrier has a fraud line and so does the state.
The network’s session was called Selling to Every Style and it taught you to read the buyer in the first ninety seconds and adjust. It cost eighteen hundred dollars a seat.
I have watched Tate Kovach do that on a porch with a widow, better than anybody in that ballroom, for thirty years, and this industry has never once asked him to teach it and has repeatedly sold a bad copy of it back to us.
The Transition
The buyer wants the transaction closed in the autumn. There are nine names on that schedule and eight of them have equity in this business and one of them has a number.
Two things gave way on me after I ran those numbers.
The medical building in 2004, to start with. That one has been an industry-dinner story of mine at three separate tables — the night I learned what a great field man is — and the punchline has always been the smell. What he actually did on that stairwell was hold four unrelated things at once — the drawings being wrong, the sound, the age of the building, the fact that it would be open at seven with people in it — and produce, in about nine seconds, the only decision that did not put water on somebody’s head. I have been telling it as an anecdote about instinct, which is a word people use when they have decided not to look at something.
Then the corner of my desk in 2017 and I just want to know if I’m allowed to ask again. For eight years I have kept that as a good-natured man taking a very large cheque with good grace. It was a question, asked once, by somebody who does not ask twice, in the only register he has, standing up, in the eleven seconds it took him to sign. And I said of course and did nothing, which is the answer he took, correctly.
What the badge had no space for. He has been sober since 2009 and has never made any secret of it and has never once talked about it either; he sends money to a brother in another state and I know because he asked me a question about taxes; and he is, on a slow morning, capable of a meanness with the younger project managers that everybody excuses because of who he is and that I have never addressed and should have.
The retention agreement on the schedule is eighteen months. The buyer’s people asked me, on a call last week, what the risk was on that one.
I said he’d stay as long as the work was interesting.
I asked Tate two years ago whether he’d take Emeka out with him for a month.
“Sure.”
I said we could build it into his plan, make it a formal thing, mentoring hours.
He looked at me the way you look at somebody who has offered to pay you for a ride to the airport.
“Just send him.”
I never sent him. There was a stretch that autumn and then there was the transition work and it went off the list, and it went off the list because it was the only item on it with no number attached.
Emeka Nwosu asked me yesterday what the difference is between Tate and the rest of the estimators, because he has been trying to work it out.
I told him to go out on the next big one and stand where he could see Tate’s face instead of the building.
He said he’d been told to shadow Cy.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.