Restored by the Storm: Bill Derrick on Resilience, Faith, Leadership, and Life’s Unexpected Challenges

Hello everyone and welcome back to Telling My Story, the podcast where we explore real-life journeys, challenges, personal growth, and the lessons that shape our life. Today, we are talking about something every person experiences at some point, life's storms. My guest is Bill Derrick, a business leader, author and public speaker with more than 50 years of experience in construction industry bill helped lead his family's business through one of the most difficult economic period in recent history but just when it seems that that storm was beginning to pass he and his family faced another diverse devastating challenge, his diagnosis with multiple myeloma and incredible blood cancer. Through these experiences, Bill discovered powerful lessons about resilience, faith, control, gratitude, and finding meaning in circumstances we don't always understand. He captured many of those lessons in his book, Restored by the Storm, navigating through life's unexpected challenges. Bill, welcome to Telling My Story, and it's a pleasure to have you here with us today.

Well, Henry, it's a pleasure for me to be here with you, and I hope our conversation will result in a couple of things that your followers can take away and help them.

I hope my followers get more insights from you. So your story is described as a story of the unexpected. Take us back to the beginning. What were some of the storms that changed the direction of your life?

Yeah, you know, so when I say unexpected, I come at it from a perspective that I had back then where I was basically in control. Control of my life, control of business, you know, just... Uh, I was never going to experience the storms in life per se. That was my attitude. My wife and I were raising a family and yeah, with four kids, you have some, you have some things going on that you have to deal with. But overall, I just thought, you know, we'll get through the little things and, and we'll avoid the big storms in life. And so. That was the perspective, uh, perspective that I had. And so when the, uh, great recession came along around 2007 ish or so, uh, our business, a construction, uh, residential commercial, uh, construction company. And also we had a lot of, a lot of land, a lot of undeveloped land that we were holding for development purposes. When that happened, our world just kind of stopped. I mean, there was the financial crisis over here. The gas prices were soaring. People stopped buying new homes. Businesses were starting to hold off on their projects that they were thinking about. And so that was something I never expected, Henry. I mean, in the end, and And looking back, I tell people it was a once every 80-year event. And the reason why I say that is because I think that the economy had never seen anything, especially in the construction and real estate market, had never seen anything like this since the Great Depression back in the 1930s. So I looked at this as this was our Great Depression. So very unexpected at that point.

Wow. Your story is really touching. So what challenge surprised you the most?

What challenge surprised me the most? I think challenge came in that it lasted as long as it did. For us, it was