Roger Williams’ legacy includes freedom to succeed

I am sitting here on my train ride to Boston, finally getting an opportunity to read a recent copy of Providence Business News, and wanted to say that the Cary Collins piece (“Rhody makeover: Focus on 21st-century industries,” Nov. 17, 2015), really hit home for me.
Born and raised in Rhode Island, my heart has always wanted to come back to the state I grew up in and create a company.
I, like many Rhode Islanders, had to leave the state to find work and have been working at the same company for almost 14 years in Boston. As I worked in Massachusetts, I watched my father, who had a successful construction company in Rhode Island, struggle with all the rules, regulations and noncompetitive insurance options (because of state regulations) for employers like him.
When I was younger, his business had four or five employees as well as numerous subcontractors that he kept busy. Over the years his business kept shrinking to where it was just him.
For a couple years he worked all by himself, building beautiful, hand-crafted spec homes. He invested in equipment and machinery to act as his employees, because it was just too expensive to hire people. And when he did hire someone, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation insurance and other taxes and fees more than doubled his costs per employee.
Rhode Island is filled with hard workers just like him, who want to bring this state back to its glory.
In 2010, after watching my father’s business come to the brink of faltering, I decided to start my real estate company. I started by selling a 380-square-foot condo in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston that I was renting out and doing a 1031 exchange. The Boston market crashed, but not as hard as other areas, and with the little profit I made, I was able to use the proceeds as a down payment for a three-family right off Broadway in Providence. It was not the prettiest property – it really needed to be brought back to life.
I talked to my employer and asked if I put in more hours over four days a week and be on call on the fifth if I could still keep my salary, and he agreed. I then set out to bring that property back to life side by side with my father Friday through Sunday. Even my mother and my wife came and helped where they could.
Most importantly, I helped other people along the way. I helped employ my father, a couple other sub-contractors, an attorney, the bank, the city’s inspection office and others as we transformed that property. Since then, we have brought five more properties back to life. Our latest project – bringing a beautiful, brick, multifamily back to life in Fox Point – took seven months to complete.
It was physically the hardest project and the most financially challenging project for us to complete thus far. We contracted more than 10 different Rhode Island companies to help us with the project, employing more than 20 people collectively.
Physically, we all worked hard, the way us Rhode Islanders were born to. I even worked with a small Rhode Island credit union, Dexter Credit Union in Central Falls and asked them to take a calculated risk on me.
Financially, this project was two to three times more expensive to complete now then it would have been five or more years ago. Yes, inflation and supplies have gone up, but you ask anyone trying to run a small business out there and the cost of labor is the most expensive cost. And not because these hard-working Rhode Islanders working for these small companies are bringing home six-figure salaries. They make $18-$25 per hour if they are lucky.
Instead it is taxes, regulations, fees and insurance associated with having a company and employing hard-working Rhode Islanders that drive up the cost.
I know I am no big-time institutional investor, but I believe in the core of what Rhode Island is. It was a place where Roger Williams wanted freedom, and we small businesses out there need the “foot removed from our necks,” as the Op-Ed stated,” so we can get up and bring this state back to its glory.
On Feb. 1, I will have earned back some of my freedom. My company in Rhode Island is finally, barely, standing up on its own, and I am at a point where the company can finally pay for me to give it 100 percent of my attention. I would love to start hiring people to help me. I know that there is more than enough work, but I know that financially it would be very difficult to make ends meet if I did at this time. But who knows.
PBN and Mr. Collins’ column have inspired me to write this. And hopefully it will inspire our great state of Rhode Island to change. •


Carlos Varum is founder and president of JCV Investments and sister company JIC Properties.

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