The Most Beautiful House in the World

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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.

How did he manage to successfully build his house? The obvious metaphor is unavoidable: he dove into the project with enthusiasm and with the meticulous planning that characterized his success off the three-meter springboard. It's not by chance that he can gaze out his dining-room windows or from the upstairs loft and look directly down into a wildlife-filled hollow. To properly place the house's foundation on his property, Olivo stood on a ladder and approximated the ravine view that has since rewarded him with sightings of deer, ring-necked pheasant, porcupines, foxes, turkeys, even a bear. So he could show his family their future home, Olivo spent 49 and a half hours ("What can I say? I'm a measurement guy") constructing a scale model out of balsa wood and Styrofoam. Later, when decisions had to be made about integrating the beam-framed ceiling of the great room with the more traditional construction of the kitchen, the model proved invaluable to Olivo in talking through the solution with Syth.

"Tom and I talked by phone a minimum of two to three times a week and faxed things back and forth," recalls the builder. "He's so into computers, he could be talking to me looking at a Webcam picture of Main Street in Bozeman and remark about how sunny it was," Syth says, laughing. "There was no way I could tell him we couldn't pour concrete because it was raining."

Olivo proved a model client. The builder says Olivo taught him a few things about how to rein in a construction budget when necessary. By negotiating contractor by contractor, Olivo was able to trim $30,000 from the total budget, saving, for instance, 5% on excavation, 37% on painting, and 11% on windows, by purchasing early.

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