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| Express Yourself |
| Home Economics ... For Real |
| Making It Work |
| Stay In Tonight ... Outside |
| Thinking Forward |
| Grow Older Together |
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| WANE-TV Villa No. 1 by Granite Ridge Builders |
| WANE-TV Villa No. 2 by Granite Ridge Builders |
| Big Brothers/Big Sisters Home No. 3 by Slattery Builders |
| Centier Bank Home No. 4 by Granite Ridge Builders |
| New 95.1 Best FM and Fun 101 Classic Hits Home No. 5 by Quality Crafted Homes |
| Carter Lumber Home No. 6 by Bob Buescher Homes |
| Frontier Communications Home No. 7 by Star Homes by Delagrange and Richhart |
| Lutheran Health Network Home No. 8 by Hickory Creek Homes |
| Fort Wayne Monthly Home No. 9 by Timberlin Homes |
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 Photo courtesy of Bob Buescher Homes It doesn't make any sense to say Bob Buescher became a homebuilder by accident ... because he's obviously in just the right profession ... but his original plan was to go into farming with his father. Families in more than 1,400 houses are grateful the then-18-year-old Bob stuck it out through that first cold winter doing rough carpentry on a framing crew, found his passion for building and designing homes and built his company, Bob Buescher Homes. "I got through that first winter, and after that I started to enjoy it and got better at it and all those sorts of things," he said. "It was a natural progression being around all the different subcontractors and seeing what they did in the business. "You start to get a grasp of what all the other trades are doing, and you think 'I can do this,' and you start to slowly get your feet wet." By the time he was 23, he was in business as a framing contractor. He hung in there through the bust times of the early 1980s and was able to enjoy the boom times that began in the late 1980s. "That's when I took the big plunge," he said. "By the time I was 32, I really wasn't swinging a hammer any more. I enjoyed it. It was good, but it's a young man's game. Very physical. By the time you get to be 40 in this business, you need to be doing something past swinging a hammer and climbing." He was building Bob Buescher Homes. He loves creating the design of the house plan, which keeps him deeply involved in the sales end of the business, too. "I sit down with the client, and they tell me what they want and where they want it. My job is to help them create a plan that fits that site," he said. "That's what motivates me. It's pretty creative, and it's not routine. Everything's a new creation." 1. What is the biggest change you have seen?When I started out, builders did a lot of different things themselves, wore a lot of different hats. They might build six houses a year, and they poured concrete, framed, painted. Now there's complete specialization. There are guys that do nothing but pour basements or driveways or frame houses. Everybody's a specialist. The things that have happened in America have happened in home building.2. Why are you participating in the 2014 Parade of Homes and Lifestyle Show?Every few years it's good to be out there in the middle of it. I was fortunate to have a client in the market for a house on that location, which made it easier. In Angola, we are in the Parade every year. People really follow the Parade there more closely than in Fort Wayne. We are only in the Parade in Fort Wayne every so often, but it had been a couple of years. We had a good Parade in Valencia three years ago, and we won People's Choice. It's nice to be able to get out there and compete.3. What's the Bob Buescher Theory of Economics you use to explain the larger economic forces to yourself?If you put yourself out there and work hard, opportunities will arise. I was pushed to accomplish; when you do that, opportunities present themselves. You can make a living doing anything. You've just got to work long enough, hard enough to get there. This is not a 40-hour-a-week job. If that's what you're looking for, go someplace else. |
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