About Shepherd's Construction
Robert Shepherd - Owner
Here is a little bio story on how I got started working in construction. Even though I am the third generation of craftsmen, I honestly never seen my self performing construction as a career.
It wasn’t until I was 16 that reality set in that being 5’10” tall and having a vertical jump of 2″ was not gonna have any NBA scouts knocking on my door any time soon.
I can still remember seeing my first major construction repair job. My father was repairing the inside of an exterior wall that a drunken driver had ran into. Nobody was hurt but the damage to the house looked horrible.
From the outside, the redbrick backyard wall that ran parallel to the main street had a nice 25ft irregular car shaped hole in it, and the exterior redbrick of the house was pushed in to resemble what the first fast food drive thru might have looked like. From the inside there was a gaping hole in the dry wall with cracked studs, red brick, electrical wires, and insulation hanging out everywhere… it looked like the 80s commercial of when the Kool-Aid man would come to the rescue and bust down an expensive wall, to save the day with a 19 cent cup of red sugar water.
I was still in high school at the time and knew, or should say I thought I knew that I never wanted to do construction for a living, seeing the ups and downs that my father had went through. I remember wanting to enter the medical field, possibly nursing, X-Ray tech, etc. I figuring job security-wise there will always be sick people, and I am a people type of person. Well as many of you know… things change, whether by self doing, or a sort of predestined opportunity… or just the oops! Didn’t see that coming, don’t want to do that again (this one seems to be my favorite).
Well as I was saying, I was in high school helping out my dad on and off at the time, so I had seen the repair that my dad had started on. Even though I knew that my dad was good at his work, I had no idea how he was going to pull this one off. The homeowners would come and check up on us as we worked. I was not confident that this was ever going to look like a wall again, and by the look on the homeowners’ faces I think that we shared the same thoughts. I had very little knowledge back then. I was basically there to hand my dad his tools (which of course were the wrong ones half of the time), get him some more coffee and to be his verbal punching bag when things didn’t go right.
When I had left the jobsite that day everything still looked the same to me. I returned a week later since I was still in school during the week. I was curious to see how the repairs had turned out. My dad said to me in a slightly arrogant tone “If you can find where the repair was, I’ll give you 25 bucks.” I said ok and started to examine the wall as if I was Columbo hot on the trail of justice. “Aha!” I said. Here is where the damage was. My dad looked at me and laughed, and told me that I was looking at the wrong wall.
After teasing me a bit he finally showed me where it was and I was very impressed (…and bummed that I didn’t get the 25 dollars). You could not tell that there had ever been any damage there at all. That’s when the addiction started… question after question of how did you do that and what’s that for. It felt like I was nine years old again.
During the next several years I ended up working some other odd jobs and always talked to my coworkers about all the cool stuff that I had done while working with my dad on the side. It wasn’t until one day a coworker friend of mine said to me “Shep you’re always talking about construction so much and how much you like it…..what are you doing here?” That’s when it hit me; I wanted my career to be in the construction field and as of Feb of 2023, 28 years later here I still am.