Marcus Hantla, Chief Operating Officer at Contractor Foreman.
Marcus Hantla has a gift for walking into chaos and walking out with a system. As COO of Contractor Foreman, he finds the blockers in an organization, kicks the doors down and builds the shortest path from point A to point B. But when you ask him where that ability comes from he won’t point to a degree or a playbook.
He’ll point to his ADHD.
He was diagnosed long before most people knew what the letters meant. Teachers and parents spent years trying to fit his brain into a straight line, from a running regimen to a VHS series promising “Where There’s a Will, There’s an A.” Eventually Marcus stopped fighting the way he was built and started using it. The impatience, the hyperfocus, the habit of connecting dots nobody else sees.
But this conversation also hits close to home. ADHD sits on both sides of the mic for this episode, and the story is a familiar one. The kid who talks too much, doodles, zones out and yet still lands on the right answer.
The difference is what happens when we each learn to see the wiring as an asset instead of a flaw.
You Can’t Run It Out of Someone
The running regimen was the first attempt to “fix” Marcus. Cross country, swimming and track all four years of high school, a varsity letter every year. That led to a running scholarship and four years of collegiate cross country and track which eventually took him to nationals.
The running worked. The plan didn’t. No amount of miles changes how a brain is built. At some point the only path forward is learning to work within yourself, understanding how your mind actually operates and regulating from there.
It’s a lesson that this industry could definitely learn from. Construction has spent a long time trying to train certain kinds of thinking out of people. The ones who don’t fit the mold get labeled as the problem instead of being asked what they see that everybody else is missing.
For example, ask a kid with ADHD to run thirty practice problems in a row and they’ll quickly lose interest. While that refusal looks like defiance in a classroom, in operations it looks like a superpower. A brain with zero patience for repetition and unnecessary steps will relentlessly hunt for the fastest route to the outcome, turning every problem into a game.
That instinct is the job description for an operations lead. Spot the friction nobody else is bothered by. Refuse to accept “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Build the system so nobody has to fight the same mess again. Handing a multi-million dollar organization to the kid who didn’t match the bell curve may seem unorthodox. And yet, that’s precisely the kid who refuses to let a team suffer through bad process.
Low tolerance for complexity isn’t a deficiency. It’s a design spec.
The Connections Nobody Else Sees
Marcus can quote every line of The Princess Bride. He can still recite the opening of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English from a high school AP class. On the surface, that’s random trivia. Underneath it is the other half of the superpower.
He collects seemingly unrelated data points and stitches them into something coherent. Everything is connected if you go looking for the connections. Think of the typical jobsite in construction and its weekly scoreboard of KPIs. Plenty of leaders stare at a number on that scoreboard in isolation. Someone like Marcus pulls the thread. How does this safety activity relate to schedule slippage? What are sub complaints really saying about a workflow? The narrative emerges from data points that looked irrelevant on their own.
Construction just so happens to be the perfect home for that kind of brain.
Few industries throw more disconnected pieces at one problem. Trades, schedules, weather, design changes, money, and people, all moving at once and none of them lining up neatly. Chaos reigns supreme on a job site. Some of us were built to find the pattern inside it.
Don’t Mistake Linear for Competent
Every industry carries a picture of what leadership is supposed to look like. Organized. Linear. Predictable. And in construction, drill sergeant energy. That style has its place, but mistaking one style of thinking for competence paints us into a corner, because construction is mostly unknowns.
Marcus learned that running an MEP company in Galveston. His crews installed the AC systems, ran the line sets up the exterior walls, tested every unit and documented everything. Every unit was cooling.
Then the callback came. “Nothing is cooling.”
Marcus did what most owners would. He got defensive and backed his team. Then he went to the site. Sure enough, none of the units were cooling. The siding crew had come through after his team and was driving nails straight into the pressurized copper line sets.
The documentation is what saved a job worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Photos, as-builts and knowing exactly where everything was installed turned an argument into a diagnosis. That’s a system doing its job. Not because someone was naturally tidy, but because someone knew memory wouldn’t hold up and refused to be left holding the bag.
It’s a pattern worth noticing. The best systems often come from people who know exactly where their own gaps are and build around them on purpose.
Know What Holds Your Attention
For anyone who has spent years being told to focus harder, Marcus’s advice is simple. Know thyself. Nobody can tell an ADHD brain what to be interested in. But once something grabs hold, nobody does it better.
That’s hyperfocus in action. The same kid who couldn’t get through a worksheet will spend hours obsessing over something that matters to them, without anyone asking. For Marcus, that’s the chaos of construction workflows. He still loves walking a job site, hearing the nail guns pop, getting sawdust on his boots and smelling fresh-cut pine. That love is fuel, not distraction.
And that’s the key for those of us with ADHD. Enjoy the ride. Stop beating yourself up for being different. Find what makes you tick and build on it. It might take a few years to see the upside, but it’s there.
As for the leaders in construction, though, the takeaway is a bit more difficult to learn. Why? Because it requires us to pay attention. Pay attention to what pulls your people in, then point that obsession at the problems that need it.
Where there’s a will, there’s not always an A. Sometimes there’s something better: a system that makes the work simpler for everyone who comes after you.
Construction is cool, tell your friends!