Dispatches from ABC National Convention 2026, Salt Lake City - Part 3
- Economic forecasting for the construction sector was educational.
- The mechanical bull was pretty cool.
- But the highlight was Lt. Col. Dan Rooney.
If you have attended enough industry conventions, you develop a certain immunity to keynote speakers. You have seen the motivational arcs, the hero’s journey slide decks, the carefully curated vulnerability followed by the triumphant pivot. You smile, you applaud, you check your phone during the transition music.
I did not check my phone once during Dan Rooney’s session. Neither did anyone else in that room.
Rooney is a U.S. Air Force Lt. Colonel, F-16 fighter pilot, three combat tours in Iraq, two-time Top Gun award recipient, PGA golf professional, founder and CEO of Folds of Honor, and bestselling author. On paper he sounds like a LinkedIn profile someone made up. In person, he is one of the most genuinely compelling human beings I have encountered at any conference in twenty years of doing this.
What follows is not a summary of his biography. It is the part of his talk that has stayed with me since I got back to Arizona. And I promise by the end of this, you will see exactly why a keynote at a construction convention belongs in a TechTip blog about running your business better.
Stay Ready So You Don’t Have to Get Ready
Rooney opened his flying career the same way most of us open anything worth doing: completely unprepared for what was actually required.
His first day of undergraduate pilot training at Sheppard Air Force Base, a colonel walked in and delivered what Rooney described as the most clarifying speech of his life. The colonel told the room they were about to embark on the most expensive, highest-attrition, most dangerous training in the United States military. Six million dollars per pilot. A 4.8% completion rate. And then he left them with this:
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”
And then: “Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”
Rooney went home that night and told his wife not to unpack the boxes. He did not think they had a chance.
Then the next morning, he started a routine he has not deviated from in 25 years. Early alarm. Coffee. Prayer. Physical discipline. Non-negotiable daily structure. Not because it felt good. Because he understood that in an F-16, when things go wrong, they go wrong at 1,800 miles an hour. The only thing that saves you is what you built before the emergency.
I want you to sit with that for a second as a business owner. Because the version of that truth that applies to your construction firm is not abstract. It is sitting on your server room floor, running your backup software, protecting your Procore environment, securing your field team’s devices. When a ransomware event hits at 6 AM on a Monday before a concrete pour, you do not rise to the occasion. You fall to whatever level your systems were at the Friday before.
Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. That is an IT strategy disguised as a fighter pilot proverb.
Dark Visor Down
One of the most memorable moments in Rooney’s talk came from his F-16 solo certification. Four rides with an instructor. Fifth ride: solo or wash out. Sitting in a $70 million single-seat fighter jet, fifteen minutes from takeoff, he realized he was not alone in that cockpit.
Every person who had ever told him he was not smart enough, not good enough, not capable of chasing this particular dream, they had all climbed in with him. His eighth-grade English teacher. People who laughed when a kid from Wasilla, Oklahoma said he wanted to be both a golf pro and a fighter pilot.
He reached over, grabbed his helmet off the canopy rail, put it on, and put his dark visor down.
“Living your life through the lens of others, I closed all of those people out. Dark visor down has become a powerful anthem in my life.”
He taxied out. Lit the afterburner. And flew.
Here is what struck me about this moment. It was not a story about bravado. It was a story about a decision. A deliberate choice to stop letting other people’s limitations define what was possible. Rooney called it avoiding becoming “a prisoner of common assumption.”
I have had that conversation with more than a few Arizona contractors. The ones who say things like, “we’re a construction company, we’re not a tech company,” or “our guys don’t work that way,” or “we’ve always done it like this.” That is common assumption. And it costs more than people realize, in lost efficiency, in security exposure, in the gap between what their systems could do and what they are actually doing.
Dark visor down is a decision available to every firm in this industry. It just requires someone willing to make it.
Resistance Is the Ingredient
Rooney’s father told him something when he announced his improbable dual dream at twelve years old. Dan said he knew planes took off into the wind. His dad looked at him and said, exactly.
“Resistance is not placed in your path to keep you down. It is God’s divine ingredient to help you ascend.”
He built on this throughout the session. The uncomfortable places, the dust storms over Iraq at zero visibility, the missions where you cannot see from here to the back of the room and you launch anyway, those are the moments that build self-belief. Not the easy days.
He talked about complacency with real urgency: “The gravest danger in our lives is the world trying to make you comfortable. Complacency is the devil’s greatest weapon against us.”
For construction firms, this is not metaphor. It is a description of exactly what happens when technology friction becomes normalized. When slow systems are just “how it is.” When backup failures get noted and ignored. When the Autodesk environment has been broken for six months and everyone has just worked around it. Comfort with dysfunction is not stability. It is complacency. And in a tighter market with compressed margins, complacency is the thing that ends businesses that should have survived.
The Mission That Started Above a Garage
Before Rooney founded Folds of Honor, he was on a commercial flight from Chicago O’Hare to Grand Rapids, Michigan. The captain announced they were carrying the remains of Corporal Brock Butman, killed in Iraq, and that his identical twin brother was in first class, having escorted him 7,000 miles home.
Rooney watched that family on the tarmac. The flag-draped coffin. The parents, the wife, the four-year-old son. And then he stood up to see that more than half the passengers had already left their seats and walked away.
He walked off that jet bridge, called his wife, and said: “We have a new mission.”
A few months later, from above their garage in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Dan and Jackie Rooney started Folds of Honor. The mission: honor the legacy, educate the families, unite Americans around those who serve.
The numbers today are staggering. Over 73,000 scholarships awarded. $340 million out the door. $.91 cents of every dollar going directly to scholarship programming, placing Folds of Honor in the top 1% of nonprofits in the country. Anheuser-Busch became a partner after Rooney cold-called them, got turned away, and came back every six months for three years until they said yes. They have donated $45 million to the organization.
This year alone, Folds of Honor is on track to award 13,000 scholarships, but will have approximately 10,000 qualified applicants who go unfunded. That is the gap. That is where your support goes.
If Rooney’s session moved you the way it moved that room in Salt Lake City, the best next step is to become a Wingman. You can learn more and support the mission at foldsofhonor.org.
What It All Adds Up To
Rooney closed with a line from his aggressor squadron’s code of conduct that I wrote down immediately and have not stopped thinking about:
“You can never be more than you are. But you must be all that you are.”
That is it. That is the whole thing. Not superhuman performance. Not unlimited resources. Not perfect conditions. Just the complete deployment of what you actually have, in service of something bigger than yourself.
For the construction firms in that room, and the ones reading this now in Arizona, that means something specific. You may not have a Fortune 500 IT budget. You may not have a dedicated internal IT team. But you have a business worth protecting, a team worth equipping, and clients depending on your systems to work when it matters most.
Being all that you are means not leaving capability on the table. Clean data. Secure environment. Reliable connectivity. Systems that work as hard as your crew does.
That is what we help construction companies build every day. Not because it is glamorous. Because when the mission depends on it, you need to already be ready.
Ready to find out where your systems stand?
Book a Free Consultation Review with Computer Dimensions.
Want to support military and first responder families? Visit foldsofhonor.org and become a Wingman.
For over 20 years, Computer Dimensions has been the trusted IT partner for Arizona's architecture, engineering, and construction industry. We help AEC firms communicate better, collaborate smarter, and actually use the technology they've invested in. Because in construction, the tools only work if your team does.
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