• Ralph Opacic, founder of Orange County School of the Arts and now chief executive of Orange County Music & Dance, says arts education keeps losing when budgets tighten, and argues that funding built to survive a downturn matters more than any single grant or gift.

A Pattern He Has Watched for Decades

Santa Ana, California, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Ralph Opacic founded Orange County School of the Arts in 1987, during a period when school districts across California were cutting arts programs to protect core academic budgets. He has watched the same pattern repeat in every downturn since.

“When money gets tight, arts programs are usually the first line item someone circles,” Opacic said. “That’s true in public schools and it’s true in nonprofits. It isn’t because people don’t value the arts. It’s because arts programs often don’t have funding built to outlast a bad year.”

Opacic says that pattern gets too little attention outside the arts world itself. Parents notice when a program disappears. Few ask why it was vulnerable in the first place.

Funding Built to Survive a Downturn

OCSA grew in part because it became a tuition-free option at a time when other schools and districts were retreating from arts education. The Orange County School of the Arts Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3) that Opacic has also led since 1988, was built specifically to keep tuition-free access intact regardless of what was happening in any single district’s budget.

“A school that depends entirely on one funding source is one bad year away from cutting the program,” Opacic said. “A foundation, an endowment, a board that treats fundraising as part of the mission and not an afterthought, that’s what lets a program keep its doors open when the money gets harder to find.”

At Orange County Music & Dance, where Opacic now serves as chief executive, the organization has built a $5 million endowment specifically so that no student is priced out of its classes. Opacic points to that structure as the kind of planning that keeps programming intact through economic cycles rather than shrinking every time one hits.

What Gets Overlooked

Opacic says the conversation about arts education tends to focus on programming: what classes are offered, what the student outcomes look like, which students get into which conservatories. Less attention goes to the financial architecture underneath it.

“Everyone wants to talk about the recital or the student who got into a great program,” he said. “Almost nobody asks how the organization is going to fund that same opportunity for the next ten years, or the next recession. That’s the question that actually determines whether a program survives.”

He says institutions that want to serve students over the long run need to treat fundraising and financial planning as part of the educational mission, not a separate administrative task handled after the fact.

A Pathway From Early Childhood Through Adulthood

Opacic says the funding question matters even more as arts organizations try to serve students across a longer span of their lives. Orange County Music & Dance now offers programming for children as young as six months through adult classes, alongside pre-conservatory and conservatory tracks for middle and high school performers.

“If you want a pathway that starts in early childhood and continues into adulthood, you can’t fund it one grant cycle at a time,” Opacic said. “You need a structure that’s still standing in fifteen years, not just this fall.”

About Ralph Opacic

Ralph S. Opacic, Ed.D., founded Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California, in 1987 and led the school as president and executive director until 2021. He also founded and led the Orange County School of the Arts Foundation, West Coast School of the Arts, Pacific Coast Dance Fest, and West Coast Musical Theatre Company. Opacic currently serves as chief executive of Orange County Music & Dance in Irvine, California, and has consulted with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center. He holds a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California.

• The Dallas fund manager says the questions an investor asks before writing a check matter more than the pitch they just heard.

A Different Starting Point

Dallas, Texas, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Gary Bassett, Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of HP Capital Partners in Dallas, Texas, has spent more than four decades moving through investment banking, enterprise software, and institutional asset management. He built that path at J.P. Morgan, founded and scaled Microbank before its sale to Citicorp, and led an investment banking division at Bank of America before launching HP Capital Partners in 2012.

Across those decades, he says the investors who do well are not the ones with the best spreadsheets. They are the ones who ask a short list of plain questions before they commit money, and who actually wait for honest answers.

“Most pitches are built to survive a good question,” Bassett says. “They are not built to survive four in a row.”

What Happens When the Story Stops Being True

Bassett says the first question he asks about any strategy is what happens to it when the thesis behind it breaks.

“Every investment has a story attached to it,” he says. “Rates will fall, a sector will consolidate, a currency will move. The question is not whether the story is good. It is what the manager does on the day it stops being true.”

He says investors rarely ask this directly, and managers rarely volunteer the answer, because it forces a conversation about losses before any money has changed hands.

Who Actually Owns the Risk Decision

The second question Bassett raises is about governance rather than strategy: who has the authority to cut a position, and under what conditions.

“A strategy is only as good as the person with their hand on the risk lever,” he says. “I want to know if that person has the authority to act without a committee meeting first.”

He points to his own work at HP Capital Partners, where asset allocation and risk parameters sit under direct oversight rather than a layered approval process, as the standard he measures other structures against.

What a Track Record Leaves Out

Bassett says a strong track record is the easiest thing for an investor to be shown and the hardest thing to read correctly.

“A five-year return number tells you almost nothing about how that return was earned,” he says. “It does not tell you how much leverage was used, how concentrated the positions were, or how the manager behaved in the one bad quarter that got smoothed over in the average.”

He says he asks managers to walk through their single worst period in detail rather than their best one, because the worst period shows how a strategy actually fails.

How It Fits With Everything Else Already Owned

The last question Bassett raises is one he says most individual investors skip entirely: how a new position interacts with everything already in the portfolio.

“People evaluate investments one at a time, as if each one exists in isolation,” he says. “It never does. A great strategy can still be the wrong addition if it moves the same way as everything else you already hold.”

He says this question matters more in periods when markets move together across asset classes, since diversification on paper can disappear exactly when it is needed most.

Questions Before Comfort

Bassett says none of these four questions are complicated, and that is the point.

“The goal is not to sound sophisticated,” he says. “The goal is to know what you actually own, and what it will do when conditions change. Most of the damage I have seen over the years came from a question that never got asked, not an answer nobody could have known.”

He says the habit of asking before committing carries over from his own background: the diligence standards built at J.P. Morgan, the operational discipline required to scale Microbank across banking and construction clients worldwide, and the risk oversight he now runs directly at HP Capital Partners.

“Capital markets reward patience with questions more than they reward confidence in answers,” he says. “That has not changed in forty-five years, and I do not expect it to change now.”

About Gary Bassett

Gary Bassett is the Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of HP Capital Partners, an investment firm based in Dallas, Texas. His career spans investment banking at J.P. Morgan, the founding and sale of Microbank Software Inc. to Citicorp, and a tenure as Managing Director of Investment Banking at Bank of America. He is a longtime resident of Highland Park, Texas, and a member of the Dallas Hall Society at Southern Methodist University.

• Alaa Jaber, a self employed business man based in St. Louis, Missouri, writes to others who work for themselves about the parts of the job nobody else sees.

To Anyone Who Clocks in Alone

St. Louis, Missouri, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, If you are self employed, you already know the strange math of it. No one tells you when you have done enough for the day. No one sets your hours but you, and no one else feels it when a week goes sideways. I have been doing this long enough to know that part never fully goes away. It just gets more familiar.

I am not writing this to hand out a system. I do not think there is one. I am writing it because I think a lot of people who work for themselves carry things quietly that are worth saying out loud.

The Quiet Weight Nobody Warns You About

When you work for a company, the company absorbs some of the risk. When you work for yourself, you absorb all of it. A slow month is not an abstract line on someone else’s report. It is your month.

I grew up with five siblings in New Jersey, so I learned early that things do not always go the way you planned, and you adjust anyway. That is most of what being self employed actually is. Not grand strategy. Adjusting, over and over, without making a show of it.

I think people outside this kind of work assume the hard part is the first leap, deciding to go out on your own. The leap is one day. The weight I am talking about is every ordinary Tuesday after that, when nothing is wrong exactly, but nothing is handed to you either.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I wish someone had told me that slow periods are not verdicts. They are just slow periods. I used to treat a quiet stretch like evidence that something was broken. Now I treat it like weather. You plan around it, you do not panic over it.

I also wish someone had told me that comparing your timeline to someone else’s is a losing game. I came up through community college in Hudson County, not a traditional business path, and for a while I measured myself against people who had a different start entirely. That comparison never once helped me get anything done.

To the People in St. Louis Doing This Alongside Me

St. Louis has its own rhythm, and I have built what I do inside that rhythm, not around it. If you are self employed here, you know the city rewards people who actually show up, not people who talk the loudest about showing up. That has mattered more to me than anything I learned in a classroom.

I did not grow up here. I came from somewhere else entirely. But the work does not care where you started. It cares whether you are still doing it a year from now, and the year after that.

One Thing I Will Say Plainly

If you are newer to working for yourself and it feels harder than you expected, that is not a sign you picked wrong. It is a sign you are doing it honestly. The people who make it look effortless are usually just better at hiding the parts that are not.

I still play basketball, football, and baseball when I can, and I notice the same thing on a court or a field that I notice in the work. Nobody hands you a good day. You put one together, piece by piece, and some days the pieces do not fit as well as others.

That is not a complaint. It is just the job, and I think it is worth saying so, for anyone else doing it alone right now.

About Alaa Jaber

Alaa Jaber is a self employed business man based in St. Louis, Missouri. Originally from New Jersey, where he grew up with five siblings, he studied at Hudson County Community College before building his career independently. He has an interest in football, baseball, and basketball, and continues to work and live in the St. Louis area.

• Andrew Dutil lays out what he expects to change in project controls and contract administration over the next year, and where that leaves people managing public works contracts.

A Harder Year for Cost Estimates

West Palm Beach, Florida, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Andrew Dutil has spent his career on the owner and contractor sides of civil works contracts, most of it tied to the US Army Corps of Engineers. He expects the coming year to put more strain on cost estimates than usual.

Material pricing has not settled into a predictable pattern. Dutil says that unpredictability shows up first in change orders, where both sides have to agree on a number before work can keep moving. When the baseline price keeps shifting, that agreement takes longer to reach.

“A change order used to be a formality on a lot of jobs,” Dutil says. “Now it is a negotiation almost every time, because nobody trusts last quarter’s pricing to hold.”

Claims Consulting Will See More Demand

Dutil works in claims consulting and contract administration as an independent contractor, and he expects that side of the field to get busier.

Projects delayed by pricing disputes or supply gaps tend to generate claims later, once someone has to account for the lost time. Dutil says he expects more of those claims to surface over the next year, particularly on larger public works jobs where schedules were set before current pricing conditions took hold.

“The claims coming now are not about bad planning,” he says. “They are about plans that were reasonable when they were written and then got overtaken by events nobody controlled.”

He expects contract administrators to spend more time documenting the reasons behind delays, not just the delays themselves, because that documentation is what eventually supports a claim or defends against one.

Scheduling Discipline Becomes Non-Negotiable

Dutil holds a Project Management Professional credential and works regularly with scheduling tools like Primavera. He says the next year will reward people who keep their schedules current rather than treating them as a document filed away after kickoff.

“A schedule that nobody updates is worse than no schedule,” Dutil says. “It gives people false confidence right up until the point it fails them.”

He expects more project teams to tighten how often they revisit the critical path, especially on jobs where a single delayed shipment can move a completion date by weeks. That kind of tracking, he says, is what separates a change order that gets resolved in a week from one that drags on for months.

What Dutil Tells People to Watch

Dutil’s outlook comes down to a few things he tells people to pay attention to over the next year:

• Material and labor pricing that moves faster than contract terms account for.
• Change orders that pile up without clear resolution timelines.
• Schedules that have not been revised in weeks despite known delays.
• Claims language that gets written after the fact instead of during the project.

None of these are new problems, Dutil says. What is different is how fast they compound when pricing is unstable.

“The fundamentals do not change,” he says. “What changes is how much room you have for error, and right now there is less of it than there used to be.”

Dutil’s background includes OSHA 30 certification and coursework through the Defense Acquisition University in contracting and facilities engineering. He says that mix of technical and contract knowledge is what the next year will demand most from people in his field: someone who can read a schedule, understand a contract clause, and see where the two are about to collide.

About Andrew Dutil

Andrew Dutil is an independent contractor working in project management, project controls, contract administration, and claims consulting. He is a combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom II who served with the US Army and later worked as a civil engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Studies and a Master of Architecture, both earned with honors from Norwich University. Dutil is a Project Management Professional and holds OSHA 30 certification, along with coursework through the Defense Acquisition University in contracting and facilities engineering. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• Ryan Basnaw, CEO of Axsus Civil Development Company in Idaho, shares the truths behind common construction management misconceptions.

Why Construction Myths Persist

Idaho, USA, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Construction companies lose thousands of hours each year to outdated beliefs that sound logical but fail in practice. These myths spread because they are easy to repeat and hard to challenge without real-world evidence. Ryan Basnaw, CEO of Axsus Civil Development Company, has built his career on testing assumptions and replacing guesswork with systems that work. He developed PM Axsus, a construction management platform designed to address the gaps left by traditional methods. Below, he corrects five myths that continue to mislead contractors.

Myth One: Documentation Slows Down Projects

Many teams believe that stopping to document work creates delays. They assume the fastest path forward is to keep moving without pausing to record details. This myth persists because documentation feels like extra work that does not contribute to visible progress.

The reality is different. Basnaw experienced this firsthand when a project required significant rework because an inspector did not document the work correctly. “A project required significant rework due to inspector not documenting our work correctly. Now we document everything so inspectors can never claim they didn’t know something when it happened,” he explains. Documentation protects projects from costly rework and keeps everyone accountable.

Practical tip: Before leaving any job site, take two minutes to photograph completed work and log the date, time, and crew members present. Store these records in a shared folder accessible to your entire team.

Myth Two: Big Ideas Drive Success

There is a widespread belief that breakthrough ideas separate successful companies from struggling ones. People think innovation alone creates momentum and that the best businesses are built on unique concepts. This myth thrives because big ideas are exciting and easy to celebrate.

Basnaw takes a different view. “I don’t believe ideas have much value unless they solve a real problem,” he says. The construction management platform PM Axsus was built not around a clever concept but around real pain points in time tracking, fleet management, and cost tracking. Solutions matter more than novelty.

Practical tip: Before investing time in a new process or tool, write down the specific problem it solves. If you cannot name a real issue your team faces daily, the idea is not ready.

Myth Three: Success Means Working Harder

The construction industry often equates long hours with achievement. People assume that the hardest workers earn the most success and that there is no substitute for putting in extra time. This myth endures because effort is visible and easy to measure.

Basnaw challenges this definition. “Success is having the freedom to do what I want with my time. That’s always been my definition. Building a business is important, but I don’t think success is only measured by revenue or job titles. It’s about creating something that gives you choices and allows you to spend your time where it matters most,” he explains. Systems and consistency matter more than hours logged.

Practical tip: Identify one task you do manually each week that could be automated or delegated. Commit to eliminating it within the next 30 days so you can redirect that time toward planning or growth.

Myth Four: Consistency Is Less Important Than Intensity

Many leaders believe that occasional bursts of focused effort produce better results than steady daily habits. They think major pushes during crunch time compensate for gaps in routine. This myth holds on because dramatic effort feels more impressive than quiet repetition.

The evidence points elsewhere. “I’ve learned that consistency and attention to detail make the biggest difference over time. Small habits repeated every day create better outcomes than occasional bursts of effort,” Basnaw notes. Systems built on daily routines outlast short-term sprints.

Practical tip: Choose one small habit tied to project quality or team communication. Commit to doing it at the same time every day for two weeks. Track your completion rate in a simple checklist.

Myth Five: Admitting You Don’t Know Something Weakens Your Authority

Construction leaders often worry that acknowledging gaps in their knowledge will undermine their credibility. They assume their team expects them to have every answer and that uncertainty signals weakness. This myth persists because leadership is often confused with infallibility.

Basnaw sees it differently. “Never be too proud to admit you don’t know something,” he advises. Asking questions and seeking input builds stronger teams and prevents avoidable mistakes. Authority comes from making good decisions, not from pretending to know everything.

Practical tip: The next time a team member asks you a question you cannot answer, respond with, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.” Model the behavior you want to see in your team.

If You Only Remember One Thing

Documentation protects your projects, consistency beats intensity, and admitting what you don’t know strengthens your leadership. Success is not about working longer hours or chasing big ideas. It is about building systems that solve real problems and give you the freedom to spend your time where it matters most.

Share This List and Try One Tip Today

Pick one myth from this list and apply the practical tip this week. Share this article with another contractor or project manager who could benefit from rethinking these common assumptions. Small changes repeated over time create better outcomes than waiting for the perfect moment to overhaul everything at once.

About Ryan Basnaw

Ryan Basnaw is CEO of Axsus Civil Development Company, a civil construction firm specializing in site work, grading, sewer and water systems, irrigation, storm systems, and turnkey subdivision and commercial civil construction. Based in Idaho, he developed PM Axsus, a construction management platform designed to help contractor-based businesses manage time tracking, fleet management, inspections, scheduling, materials, and project costs. He holds degrees in engineering and petroleum engineering and is a member of the Association of General Contractors.

• Dr. Kurt Hatch, retired Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the Educational Administration program in the School of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma, pushes back on the common rule that fairness means treating every student the same way.

Washington, USA, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Dr. Kurt Hatch says that rule is where a lot of good intentions quietly go wrong. Sameness is easy to measure and easy to defend in a meeting. It is also, in his view, a poor stand-in for fairness.

“If two students arrive with different needs and you give them the identical response, you have not treated them equally,” he says. “You have just made sure the gap between them stays exactly where it started.”

Hatch points to multi-tiered systems of support as a case where this gets settled in practice rather than debate. A tiered model does not give every student the same intervention. It matches the support to what a student actually needs, which means two students in the same classroom can be getting very different things at the same time.

“Nobody looking at a well-run tiered system calls it unfair,” he says. “They call it responsive. The confusion only shows up when we talk about equity in the abstract instead of watching how good systems already work.”

That gap between what schools already practice in their support systems and what they still say out loud about fairness is, in his view, worth noticing.

The sameness rule tends to hold up fine when the stakes are low: a shared classroom routine, a common grading rubric, a single school calendar. Hatch says it starts to fail once race, language, disability, or economic circumstance shape what a student walks in needing.

“A policy that looks neutral on paper can still produce very different outcomes for different students,” he says. “Neutral is not the same as equitable. Bias does not require anyone to intend harm. It can live quietly inside a rule that treats everyone identically.”

He is careful to separate this from the idea of lowering expectations for some students and not others. The standard he holds is the same for everyone. What changes is the support needed to get there.

Hatch’s background in systems leadership gives him a different question to put in place of “are we treating everyone the same.” He asks leaders to look at outcomes first, then work backward to the structures producing them.

“If a practice is producing uneven results across groups of students, the practice is the thing to examine, not the students,” he says. “That is a harder conversation than asking whether a rule applies to everyone. It is also the only conversation that actually moves outcomes.”

He also pushes leaders to separate two things that get collapsed together: consistency and uniformity. A school can be consistent in how it decides what support a student gets without being uniform in what that support looks like. In his experience, leadership teams that keep those two words apart make better decisions than teams that use them interchangeably.

Hatch’s view is shaped by work that spans classrooms, district leadership, and state policy. He has spent time watching where policy meant to help students gets simplified on its way into a building, often losing the nuance that made it work in the first place. The sameness rule, he argues, is one of those simplifications: a complicated idea about fairness flattened into something easy to repeat, at the cost of the students it was supposed to protect.

To read more, visit the website here.

Dr. Kurt Hatch is a retired Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the Educational Administration program in the School of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma. His work covers systems leadership, equity and bias, multi-tiered systems of support, and school behavioral and mental health. He has worked as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal in Washington state school districts, and has delivered keynote addresses as well as led professional learning at the local, state, and national level.