As a child, I never imagined that one day I would be the president and CEO of the largest architecture, engineering and interior design firm in Kentucky. I grew up poor on a tobacco and dairy farm in rural Kentucky. It was land given to my French ancestors for their military service in the Revolutionary War, but that makes it sound more glamorous than it was. The reality of life on the farm was that times were tough. As my grandfather used to say, “We were land rich but money poor.” Due to some unique family challenges and the declining agricultural economy of the 1970s, we were essentially living as sharecroppers on our own land. We lived in a tenant house on the farm that my mother fixed up. Despite having no plumbing in the house until I started school, she did her very best to make our little farm house a home.

Food was scarce, and there was certainly no extra money for clothes and toys. But here’s the thing — we were happy. That’s the way it is with poverty sometimes. You often don’t know what you don’t have. We worked incredibly hard in the tobacco fields but we didn’t know anything different; that’s just the way it was. We worked together as a family, including all five of my siblings. My father worked harder than anyone I have ever known. To this day he has a sense of peace that can only come from a hard day’s work. He instilled in me a work ethic that has served me well throughout my life, but that would also haunt me as I struggled later to find a work-life balance.