The Aspire Institute Story

What do we do? Simple — all we do is make General Contractors more successful, guaranteed.

Hi, my name is Ken Brookings. I’m the founder and Chairman of Aspire. I grew up in the contracting business. My father took great pride in his work, however, he never learned anything about business. As a result I grew up poor, very poor. My father died just as I was graduating from high school. I tried to continue the business but there really wasn’t anything to continue.

Later, when I learned what business was really about I realized that the problem wasn’t the contracting business, quite the opposite actually — it was that my father was trying to be a contractor without having any idea how to run a business. As a result, he worked way too hard, for way too long for way too little — and died doing it.

I found a great way to pay my way through college and so I spent a lot of years in school learning engineering, psychology and business.

My college economics professor connected me up with a Fortune 500 corporation and by my 28th birthday I was a corporate Vice President there. Big paychecks and good for the ego but the work felt meaningless. Nothing changed as a result of my work, particularly people’s lives. I left the corporation and became a strategic and marketing consultant at the highest levels of some of America’s greatest companies; Goodyear Tire, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Firestone and Apple Computer to name a few. I quickly learned that this approach to big company work was even less satisfying than working in one.

Then I found something I really cared about: Helping smaller businesses, like my dad’s, to grow, thrive and prosper. I could witness, firsthand, the prosperity of the business owners, their families and their employees improve thanks to our work. General Contracting is noble work — changing lives and fulfilling dreams. The fact that the company I created does the same for the builders is more gratifying than I know how to say. It’s why we do what we do.

Over the decades we have developed and refined a method now called The Aspire Method™. The Aspire Method™ ensures that we won’t waste our clients time or well-earned money with happy talk or telling them things they already know or putting them through generalized motherhood and apple pie type training. We roll our sleeves up, teach and help implement a new level of professional business methods and practical tools shaped specifically for GCs.

We are designed for GCs that want to take their business to the next level. Aspire is a successful consulting, training and educational company that is so effective we can guarantee that every client will enjoy a substantial lift in profits far greater than our cost while gaining a fine quality of life enhancement — I like that.

Ken