Tom Olivo built the house that changed his life -- from 1,200 miles away.
How Tom Olivo built the house that changed his life.
In Tom Olivo's dream house you can pretty much pick a window and name the mountain range. The triple-level windows below the cathedral ceiling of the great room frame the Gallatin Range. Through the kitchen window the snowcapped Bridger Mountains loom close enough to tilt your head back. From the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom the view stretches 40 miles to the Tobacco Root Mountains. The dining room looks out on the Madison Range and the Beartooth Mountains in the Absaroka Range.
"If I ever take this for granted, there's something wrong with me," says Olivo, who adds that he occasionally pinches himself to make sure he's not still merely imagining his fantasy home.
In the giant mountain-rimmed bowl that is Bozeman, Mont., Olivo's four-year-old house sits on five foothill acres at 5,000 feet above sea level, partway up the eastern side of the bowl. Olivo looks down on propeller planes circling to land at a private airstrip and marvels at approaching storms that sweep in over the Continental Divide, convulsing the sky. A neighboring rancher's wheat spreads like a giant comforter over the land, just 200 feet from his bedroom. But even better than the views is what lured Olivo to the area: the trout fishing down in the valley. Abundantly blessed with spring-fed creeks and snowmelt-coursing streams and rivers, Bozeman is arguably the fly-fishing capital of America. By the end of August, Olivo had already stepped into his waders some 35 times for the year. He's not retired -- just determined enough and shrewd enough to hook himself nearly every entrepreneur's fantasy -- raising his children and living the good life year-round in a picture-postcard setting far from the madding crowd.
The 44-year-old Olivo built his 5,300-square-foot home on time and on budget. Even more noteworthy, he did so from 1,204 miles away, in San Diego, where he was establishing a management-consulting firm called Success Profiles Inc. A former NCAA champion diver and top diving coach, Olivo moved his family and business to Montana the same way he achieved success in sports: by beginning with the end in mind and visualizing how to get there.
But even the forward-planning Olivo hadn't visualized all the ways his original goal would alter his life.
That particular goal -- a house in prime fly-fishing country -- first entered his mind after his wedding in 1989 but really can be traced back to his childhood in Bedford Hills, N.Y., a pastoral part of Westchester County. Olivo shouldered his first fishing rod at age 4. By the time he was 8, his parents let him head off alone to a nearby reservoir to fish. He loved the freedom of coming and going and the pleasure of one "final" cast after another as the sun set. He was hooked for life. But it was when he and his wife, Katie, a lover of the outdoors, honeymooned in New Zealand, a fly-fishing mecca that boasts many of the planet's most prized trout streams, that Olivo realized the depth of his passion for angling.
The Olivos' notion back then was to build a getaway place, a vacation home in the mountains, close to great fishing. They considered Flagstaff, Ariz., and Boulder, Colo., but fell in love with Bozeman on their first visit there, in 1991. Before flying back to California, they purchased the five-acre site of their future home. During that same visit, Olivo drew a floor plan of their dream home on a piece of graph paper. The final design of the home is virtually identical to that original sketch, right down to the old recycled beams the Olivos bought from a local company called Big Timberworks.
While the Olivos didn't change the original design of their home by much, their designs on their home would be greatly altered. The reason? The way that two births affected their lives.
The first was the birth of Tom Olivo's company, which grew out of his job as a personal financial planner at the Equitable. When a number of clients started asking him to help them with their businesses, Olivo discovered he enjoyed that work much more than his day job. Each client company had its own dynamics and problems, and he found those puzzles infinitely more challenging than estate planning. So in late 1990, while still with the Equitable, he launched Success Profiles and spent the first couple of years identifying key business-performance diagnostic measures and learning how to assess them. Then in 1992 his first daughter, Sarah, was born. Thinking back to his own childhood, Olivo couldn't help wishing that his daughter might experience the kinds of outdoor adventures and the freedom he'd enjoyed, for he knew only too well the shortcomings of their home in highway-jumbled Southern California.
San Diego's metro population had swelled by some 800,000 in the 13 years the Olivos had lived there. On some days Tom Olivo could just about run the five miles to work faster than he could get there by car. Drive-by shootings occurred frighteningly close to his family's neighborhood. The local airport was impossible. "There's more to quality of life in San Diego than the ambient air temperature," Olivo told himself and others, as the urge to relocate grew stronger.
Southern California was not where he wanted to raise his children. Yes, his Equitable customers were there. But if he could replace that income stream with a thriving management-consulting business that had clients nationwide or internationally, he should be able to live wherever he pleased. And Bozeman pleased him plenty -- equipped as it was with its unhurried, refreshingly low-key airport served by several airlines. Still, the leap was huge, entailing the kind of personal upheaval that even risk-taking entrepreneurs can find difficult.
The still-echoing words of a friend helped him take the plunge. "Tom, are you going to wait for the second time around to go first-class?" the friend asked. Why wait to live in his dream home, Olivo asked himself, if he could build it soon? So the goal became clear: instead of a vacation home, he would build a primary residence in Bozeman and move in by September 1997, in time for Sarah to start kindergarten.
Tom Olivo is a self-taught businessman, instructed primarily by his experiences in sports. He's writing a book tentatively titled Everything Important I Learned About Business I Learned From Fly-Fishing, which purports that successful fishermen and successful CEOs share analytical and problem-solving skills. "The goal is not to have the nicest tackle box. The goal is to catch the most fish and have fun. In business, it's to generate cash and increase shareholder value," he says. Apart from innate physical talent, what drove Olivo's collegiate career as a two-time All-American diver at SUNY Cortland was his ability to mentally rehearse each dive and picture himself entering the water straight as a plumb line, with barely a splash.
"I would go to the pool 20 minutes before anyone else, go down to the underwater windows, and visualize my entire workout, dive by dive," he says. "I learned as an athlete that what you do today in your workout is what's going to help you get to where you want to be."
For Olivo, getting to Bozeman meant squirreling away enough money to build a first-class home. He and Katie decided to live frugally on her salary as a cardiovascular technician and bank the early income generated by the first paying customers of Success Profiles. (Old habits die hard: Olivo still drives a '92 Pathfinder.) Then came the interviewing of builders (three) and the typically unpleasant task of overseeing the builder who oversees the various subcontractors. (You've heard the horror stories.) The builder the Olivos chose, Jim Syth of Bridger Builders Inc., was booked two years out, but because the couple was planning so far in advance, that worked out fine. So did the entire home-building process, which Tom Olivo terms "a wonderful experience," employing an adjective seldom used by couples building a home.
