By Robin Washington

Sept. 8, 2017

You’ll forgive Abraham Gonzalez if he’s a little off in quoting Shakespeare. He majored in psych, not English, so when he says “Sweet are the fruits of adversity” (Shakespeare said “uses,” not fruits), he gets the essence right: The key word is adversity. That’s because he’s lived it. Born in Boston, Gonzalez’s parents divorced when he was 2 and his mother took him to Miami, where they lived on welfare and child support.

“She was disabled and couldn’t work,” he says, calling life “very, very sad.” To help make ends meet, “She would send me to work with my uncles doing carpentry when I was 10, 11, 12.”

Um, that would be child labor. Did the clients know?

“They didn’t care. It was mainly mom and pop shops. Contracting was the wild wild West back then,” he said.

He returned to Boston to attend Bunker Hill Community College and joined his father’s contracting business — and the school of hard knocks.

“I didn’t get a lot of help from him and initially had a lot of resentment for that. Later, I actually thanked him for making my life difficult, because life is difficult,” he says, adding: “It’s not that he did it intentionally. That brings its own issues.”

If every family has issues, theirs came to a head when father and son had different ideas on running a business. The younger Gonzalez went on his own in 2004. “I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Harvard Square. Every morning I had to make sure my bed was nice and made for the girl who was helping me to be presentable. From there I had a small house. We grew to the dining room.”

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Abraham Gonzalez

Title: President, One Way Development

Age: 43

Education: Bachelor of Science in psychology, Boston College, 2001

Residence: West Roxbury

Timeline

1974: Born, Boston

1976: Parents divorce, moves with mother to Miami

1999: Returns to Boston to attend Bunker Hill Community College. Graduates Boston College in 2001.

2004: Starts business out of one-bedroom apartment, doing apartment turnovers

2008: Loses 70 percent of business in Great Recession; retools

2017: Opens new office in Newmarket