When I was a kid, I thought summer was the greatest thing going. School was out, and the whole day was mine. Nat King Cole even had a song for it — “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer.” That was the idea, anyway.

It didn’t take long for the chain link fence business to set me straight.

I grew up in my father’s company. He started Richard’s Fence in 1968 and ran it for more than fifty years before he retired in 2020. Today my brother Eric and I run it together. And one thing I learned early is that in this industry, summer is the busiest season of the year — not the laziest.

I can prove it with my own childhood. We rarely took a family vacation in the summer, because my dad was working. The busy months simply don’t leave room for getting away. Our family trips came in the winter, when we’d drive down to Florida to visit relatives, then turn around and head home to get ready for the spring rush. All these years later, summer still means work first around here.

My own summers in the business started young. As a teenager, I spent long days dog-earring cedar fence boards — feeding them through one after another, hour after hour. The time went faster with music, and I had a new band called The Cars playing on my 8-track. (If you know the band and you know the format, you can probably guess the year.) After about four hours of that, my mom would pick me up and drop me at the community pool to meet my friends. I felt like I had earned that swim.

By college, a buddy and I were installing fence over the summer. My most memorable job was an emergency call to the National Guard Armory in Canton. A gate had been damaged, and one of the big contractors couldn’t get to it, so they asked whether two college kids could replace it on a Saturday. We showed up with the new gate — and discovered that nobody had a key. The commander had taken the lock with him for the weekend. No problem: we pulled the hinges, dropped the old gate, and hung the new one. They were glad to have it done. They were a little less glad about how easily two college students had gotten into a military facility.

I think about those summers often, because the work hasn’t changed as much as you might expect. Summer is still our peak. Other than the major holidays, this industry runs year-round, and the warm months are when everything runs hardest. Here is some of what that looks like for us today.

We lean harder on safety and training. The yard and the plant are at their busiest — trucks in and out all day, machinery running every shift — and the heat adds its own risks. We train on heat illness and hydration, because the worst thing we could do is get so busy that we forget to protect our people. They are our most valuable asset.

We use the season to find good people. When we bring on seasonal help, we ask our supervisors to watch how they work and how they fit with the crew. Some of our best full-time employees started as summer hires.

We protect our delivery commitments. Our contractor customers are racing the good weather to start and finish their jobs, so this is when supply-chain discipline matters most. They need to know we will be there when we say we will.

And we still make time for the industry itself. The CLFMI Summer Meeting is the one event I count on every year to mix a little relaxation with real value — meeting new people in the trade and learning from the speakers we bring in.

We do most of these things year-round. We just do them with a little more urgency once the temperature climbs. The lazy, hazy days I imagined as a kid never really arrived — but I wouldn’t trade the busy ones for anything.

Here’s hoping your summer is a safe, productive, and profitable one.