do the demolition, the drywall, and all of the painting interior and a little bit of exterior as well. Through the years, he’s had a number of employees, some who stuck around a little longer than others. He was the sole owner and probably had an average of 3-4 employees for quite a while.”

Like many Hmong children who are forced to translate for their parents, Wensy’s first involvement with Amigo was translating for his father on occasion.

“I picked up on English fairly fast,” Wensy recalled. “We came here to Madison in 1981. I didn’t know any English. But I picked it up within six months. Over the years, I probably started working alongside of him when I was 10-11-years-old. I was going with him to places to negotiate or discuss something. Mostly it was the translation that I was involved with. Once in a while, you need a task to do. But I was a kid then and of course, I didn’t really want to do that. It was my duty as a kid. I had to go with him to mostly translate, sometimes to buy things with him. That was my job in the earlier years.”

Wensy felt that many residential homeowners tried to take advantage of them and so Wensy urged his father to just focus on commercial work.

“Dealing with so many personalities of people who have different choices made it difficult,” Wensy said. “They didn’t want a red. They wanted a different type of red. We would lose on that. We wouldn’t be able to get any kind of documentation for a change. We would always see that. So I would always tell my dad, ‘We have to stop dealing with so many people. You have to deal with people on a weekly basis.’ That’s the other thing with residential. The need to go to commercial was that when you are in commercial, you basically have a spec book that you go off of that says, ‘This is your color. This is what they require.’ You’re there for a month or a longer period of time whereas in residential, you go in there and you’re dealing with a different person every week. Sometimes you finish the job in a day or two. And you have to have something else lined up. So it was a constant search for new work, constantly dealing with new people and new attitudes and new ways of doing their business and how they would treat us at that time.”

That doesn’t mean that working commercial was a walk in the park.

“I would have to be able to go to job sites and before I started estimating, before I learned how to estimate, I would just have to go to the job sites themselves, the job trailers,” Wensy said. “I would have to walk into the job trailer. Often times, I would have to say, ‘We’re a painting and drywall company. We would like to be able to help you guys out on a project.’ Little did I know, most of the times when projects had taken off, when they are actually on the ground doing work, they have already let the contracts on a majority of things. Obviously it was getting to know that world, learning it. We had contractors like Bachman, Daniels, and McGann who had plan rooms. In their offices, they would have this room. Back then, it wasn’t digital. It was all paper. They had these huge blueprints. You would go there. I don’t know how my dad learned. But he knew how to do a takeoff. And it is pretty basic, but back then, I didn’t know how. He had picked that up. But he learned how to do takeoff and would show me, ‘This is the ruler. This is why you do this. You pick up on this, the number of windows and doors.’ He explained things to me while I was there with him. Those things helped a lot. That’s another way of us getting the trust of the general contractors. They knew we were at their offices. They knew we were doing our takeoffs. They would ask questions. And then we started getting larger projects mainly because of that.”

Wensy graduated from La Follette High School in 2000. While he attended Madison College for a couple of years, Wensy began to work for his dad full-time.

“In 2005, we got our first shot at a large project, the Avalon Apartments on Allied Drive with Gorman & Company,” Wensy said. “I became a partner with him in 2008. We were on Stewart Street from 2007-2011. In 2011, we moved into Watson, which is behind Stewart Street. It wasn’t until November 2017 that we bought the Cambridge Building. We were there for about six years”

Amigo also got a taste of being a general contractor.

“We had the opportunity to do our first general contractor job, which was the Southwest Employment Center for the Urban League,” Wensy said. “First, we had hired a project manager who had experience in the general contractor world. Number one, you had to be the low bidder. I think we were $50,000 lower than the second lowest bidder. That gave us the job. It was really nice that we were able to do it for the Urban League. But coming out of that project, like we do now, we sit down and analyze how we estimated the project, pre-construction and post construction and where our numbers are at. How did we do margin-wise? What obstacles did we see? What do we want to change? I remember sitting down with my parents afterwards. I said, ‘I don’t know if the general contracting world is going to be a part of Amigo. I kind of left it alone for a while. I had been dancing around it for a while now. But I have really learned to focus my attention on the cladding and the clients that are giving us those cladding jobs.”