It’s easy to be buoyed along by Weiss’ sense of humor and easy manner. Like everyone else who comes into contact with him, both Gross and Motsenbocker have become lifelong friends as has Susie Love, executive vice president, director of sales and marketing for Emmis Publishing. “I’ve known Mike for 200 years,” she jokes. The two of them created a Weiss & Currise ad campaign for an Indianapolis regional magazine and have been friends ever since. “Not only did he come through as a client for the magazine, but also as someone I hired to do work in my home, and that’s not easy to do,” Love says.
Having come from commercial development where he was involved in land acquisition and finance, Weiss says he began to miss “the professional interchange” and decided to attend a national meeting of the Home Builders Association. “I went to CGR and stayed there. That became my profession.”
Yet, despite the hours he spent at the NAHB over the years, Weiss was able to successfully run a $1.3 million remodeling company. In January 2005 he literally turned the company over to COO Greg Woods. “Imagine [the cartoon character] Snoopy lurking like a buzzard,” Weiss says. “That’s the picture that comes to mind, where the old person watches over the business. The new person needs to be able to screw up. I probably left some money on the table, but I think the world of Greg. He was more than a partner.”
As a self-proclaimed “association junkie,” Weiss has an almost insatiable hunger for knowledge, and from the beginning of his relationship with the NAHB and the RC, Weiss served on as many committees as he could —mostly those on education, training, and development. He completed his own CGR and CGB between 1987 and 1990 and worked his way through the association ranks, to become chair of the CGR Board of Governors in 1996.
And then in fall 2002, Weiss was named chair of the Remodelors Council for 2003. During his acceptance speech, he told the audience it was time for the industry and its leaders, the trade associations, and the media to work together and cast aside their differences. What he was really talking about was collaborating in some way with the other industry association — the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI). “I don’t know if I made more friends than enemies that night,” Weiss says of the issue that’s been a sensitive one for as many years as the two associations have coexisted.
“I really think he’s the firecracker for trying to make this happen,” says Mark Brick, owner of B&E General Contracting and president of NARI during Weiss’ tenure at the helm of the RC.
Both men agree that the remodeling industry would be stronger if the two associations worked together, but more than four years after their “historic” handshake and continued efforts to close the gap, no one can agree on how this can be done. “There are a lot of hurdles to cross for whoever is in leadership roles today,” Brick says. To be fair, there are many issues, such as lead abatement, on which the two organizations are currently partnering.
Now that he has retired from running his remodeling company, Weiss has more time to feed his constant need to give back and to spend time with family. He cooks gourmet meals for himself and wife Jeannie, whom he married in 1980. (He has three children from a previous marriage, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.) He continues to teach courses and write and update curricula. He formed the RCMI — Residential Construction Management Institute — to provide instruction, consulting, management training, and curriculum development. One current project being done through the Home Builders Institute is a LeapFrog platform e-book called Sed de Saber (“Thirst for Knowledge”), a program to help Spanish-speakers understand construction-specific terms for both performance and safety. Weiss is also working on his own book about how to develop and write a company manual. “He’s a teacher more than a preacher, and that’s what we need more of,” says Bob Hanbury, past chair of the Remodelors Council.
If there’s one thing that makes a good teacher, it’s his or her own efforts to learn and move forward. In Weiss’ home he has a wood-paneled den with glass cabinets lit with a warm glow. Inside the cabinets, rather than plaques, golden gavels, and other evidence of a successful career, are wood-carved waterfowl and decoy ducks.
Carving is one of Weiss’ lifelong hobbies, and prominently displayed are his best pieces alongside his first not-so-accomplished carving. His favorite piece is not one of his own, however, but one done by friend and well-known display decoy carver, the late Dick LeMaster. In that carving, a partially completed mallard hen seems to emerge from a breadbox-size block of tupelo wood. There is a sense of movement in the carving. It seems, like Weiss, to be still incomplete but learning, still striving while reaching out to others.