A mission to serve and build

SHELLEY ELK

In 2010, Avi Barzelai returned from two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the Canadian Armed Forces. While overseas, he was stationed on the ground during his first tour, driving a LAV III armored off-road terrain vehicle with a turret, eight wheels and high-explosive canon. During a second tour, which lasted nine months, he was a helicopter door gunner. His job during both tours, he told the Independent, “was to keep my unit and crew safe and make sure they all got safely home.”

Speaking via Skype, Barzelai said he faced numerous challenges upon his return home, but the most pressing at the time, he said, were his inability to articulate his skills to a potential employer, and the inability of the employer to understand his skills as a veteran. He said he tried many things, “even things that you would think that a soldier might be well suited for, like security work.” He found it extremely difficult, noting, “I have been responsible for millions of dollars worth of equipment, and dozens of human lives, but that’s not something that a potential employer possibly understands.”

Today, Barzelai is president and owner of Veterans Contracting (veteranscontracting.ca), a Vancouver-based company that hires veterans to do interior and exterior renovations, landscaping, home maintenance and painting. “I run a general contracting business, and the one thing we do differently is draw our employee base from ex-serving members of the Canadian Forces,” he said. “After several years of soul searching, the best thing for me to do was just to hire myself and create my own job, start my own business and hire my friends who I knew were going to be able to be good at what they did. So that’s how my company came to be, and it’s been fairly successful ever since.”

Established in November 2012, Barzelai said that the real impetus to start his own business grew out of the disillusionment he experienced in coming home and trying to find meaningful work.

“When I came home from overseas, I spent a couple of years trying to figure out what to do and, at the end, I said, if no one is going to give me a job, what I’ll do is start one that is meaningful and values me,” he explained. “So it really is about necessity.”

What started off as a hobby became much more, Barzelai explained. “I started off doing some projects on my own and, really, family and friends just digged some of the stuff I was doing and said, ‘Hey, you know, what you’re doing is pretty cool! We like it. Have you thought about going into the business, or doing our kitchen or something like that?’

“Initially, I said, ‘No, no. It’s just something I am doing more as a hobby.’ I guess, after a couple of years of not having a job, I started to [re]consider. You know, it’s a skill set that I have and it’s something that I can sell to people, and I really do think we have a quality service. Although, the one thing I will say is that I can’t be an expert on everything and, so, the best thing that I can do is surround myself with really good tradesmen.”

Barzelai is proud of his employees. “I surround myself with a really good team and every home owner that I deal with recognizes that they’re not just dealing with me, they’re dealing with a great team, as well. I’m the face of the business but I have really exceptional employees that exceed my expectations every single day and, at the end of the day, make home owners extremely happy.”

Unlike some larger companies, Veterans Contracting does not shy away from smaller jobs. “It’s really hard to find contractors that are interested in finding the small jobs,” Barzelai said. “What we find is doing the small jobs for a home owner is a really good way to build trust. So, for example ... it might not be a lot of money changing hands, but, if we, as a contractor, can prove we are reliable at a small job, it goes a long way for the home owner and it’s a really good way of building the relationship....”

Whether it’s fences, decks or major renovations, Veterans Contracting pays attention to quality materials and workmanship. “We started building our own fences and whatever was the standard,” said Barlezai, but then went further. “So, let’s say, the average company [was] putting their posts in at two feet; we did three feet. [If they used] one bag of concrete, we would use two. [If they used] thin three-and-a-half-inch posts, we would use four-inch posts. We would stain our fences. We would build them custom made. On each element, we would try to do better than the competition....”

In addition to speaking about his business with the Independent, Barzelai also spoke, with a heavy heart, about the news that four Canadian soldiers had taken their own lives in recent weeks. There have been calls for an inquiry into how the military is handling mental health issues and Postnews reported earlier this month that, according to Canada’s Department of National Defence, “Seventy-four military personnel killed themselves between 2008 and 2012,” an average of at least a dozen or more a year. The “number of outstanding inquiries had risen to 70, including four that were outstanding from 2008 and seven from 2009.” The increase in the number of suicides is marked. In 2007, for example, there were 10 suicides reported; in 2006, eight.

“It’s obviously very sad,” said Barzelai. “I don’t know the answer, I don’t know how to fix this. What I’m focused on is one issue of a wide spectrum of issues that veterans face when we come home, specifically focusing on employment.... There are also other issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, operational stress injuries and social integration, as well. A lot of soldiers, particularly reservists, when they come home, [they] don’t have a strong network ... when they come home, they’re kind of on their own.”

He continued, “I am not the expert on all this. What I am focused on is employment. Employment is ... everything for a soldier when they come home. It’s not just the ability to support yourself, it’s a sense of pride, and it’s about doing something that’s meaningful and valuable to both yourself and the people around you. If there’s the opportunity to speak about employment issues in the future, I can see myself talking about that, for sure.”

Noting that Canada will be drawing down from Afghanistan soon, Barzelai said, “It’s going to bring all these issues to the surface again, which I think is really important.”

Veterans face several significant challenges, he explained. “If we can develop something as simple as getting soldiers employment when they come home, it would [go] a long way to help them” reintegrate healthfully into society. Facing challenges is more bearable with a support network, he added. It can be “as simple [as] friends to come home to [or support] for PTSD and physical injuries.”

As well, “soldiers in reserves don’t have the ability to be part of a unit when they go back home. For combat soldiers, their unit ... it’s like a brotherhood.” The best way to deal with the stresses of life, he said, “is with your brotherhood.”

About the mental health challenges faced by Canadian soldiers, Barzelai added, “I don’t have statistics to back it up but, from my impressions, suicides were not [happening] in tight-knit combat teams overseas.... They were detached or stationed at an airfield base where they had a lot of alone time and where there is not as much of a brotherhood. My sense is that suicides are a lot more prevalent outside of tight-knit units. Maybe [being in a tight-knit group] keeps soldiers from committing suicide. They would feel as if they are letting [their] brothers down.”

There’s a different sense of space and community on base, he continued. When stationed at an operating base, he explained, “we were in a bunker with 15 people, eating, sleeping, working, doing whatever, with the same group of people. It isn’t even logistically possible to kill yourself.” At night, he added, “If one guys is feeling down, everyone else picks it up instantly.”

Joining the military is not a typical choice for young Jewish Canadians, but Barzelai has always done things his own way. “I’ve always had a strong desire to do something different, and also serve my country,” he said. “I think a lot of my peers at that age were probably going on to university. To me, that just seemed to be the thing that everybody else was doing, so I figured joining the army was definitely a more interesting and worthwhile approach, and there are all the things associated with joining the military and serving overseas, like the adventure and the independence and the camaraderie. It’s given me the ability to have a very diverse, unique set of experiences, which I don’t think any other young person in my position would have had the opportunity to do. So, yeah, I just think that [it gave me] the opportunity to do something different and important.”

Barzelai is still a reservist with the C4 Highlanders regiment, and Veterans Contracting – providing meaningful, long-term work for returning soldiers – is a large part of his continuing effort to do something “different and important.”

“I would like to build my company one brick at a time. Eventually, I would love to be able to build custom homes for people that will last a hundred years, that one family could pass on to the next few generations, that’s my dream,” he said. “But it’s just about one customer at a time, just making one customer happy, and getting there over a long and fruitful process.”

Shelley Elk is a freelance writer and artist living in Vancouver. Follow her on Twitter, @shelleyelk, or visit shelleyelk.tumblr.com.

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