The Story Before the Success: A Father's Day Reflection

When my mother passed unexpectedly two years ago, I spent six months traveling back and forth to Boston, sorting through my family's archives and selling our family’s home. Photographs, letters, books, documents, and heirlooms. I organized and sorted our family record of a life being built.

Going through those boxes changed how I understood my parents, and what stood out wasn’t their successes. It was the years leading up to them.

Today, on Father's Day, I find myself reflecting on some of those stories about my father and wanting to share them.

What I've come to admire most about my father is his determination and have a lifetime of stories depicting his tenacity.

Two weeks after graduating college, my father reported to Fort Benning in Georgia before serving in Vietnam. While serving in Vietnam, he rose through the ranks, continued studying, and took his GMATs while on active duty. It was a story I heard often whenever I complained about homework as a kid. He was determined not to lose a single moment on his path forward. Which for him was focused on moving to Boston to pursue business.

Capt. Torrence Harder, Baltimore, Maryland, 1966.

After Vietnam my parents started our family while living in my grandparents' basement in Revere Massachusetts. For seven years, they started their life together, supported by my mother's work as a public school teacher and my father's determination to break through the old guard and Boston establishment. He was a guy from upstate New York armed with an education, a vision, and not much else.

My parents on a winter escape from my living in my grandparents' basement in 1974.

My father likes to say he never worked a day for anyone else, a reflection of his fiercely independent spirit. A statement he’ll make when encouraging others to find their passion and work toward their goals. But when I look back on his life, I see a man who believed in his ideas, worked relentlessly to bring them to life, and helped countless others do the same.

He's spent his career building businesses, pursuing new ideas, and solving problems. From automating Wall Street research and advancing cellular technology in the 1980s, to helping healthcare providers stay UpToDate through automated medical information systems, to bringing educational curriculum online for colleges and universities, he's consistently been drawn to the intersection of information, technology, and access.

Along the way, he's shared his knowledge generously, helping people find the confidence, resources, and opportunities to pursue their own ambitions.

When I started Harder Development at 28, I realized that one of the greatest gifts my father had given me was my entrepreneurial mindset.

When I didn't finish college and enthusiastically jumped into the job market, he told me, "If you have a library card, you can get an education."

A lifelong student and a devout Buddhist, he believes that curiosity, humility and a commitment to learning can take you anywhere.

He is absolutely right.

Instead of focusing on the credentials I didn't have, I focused on the knowledge I could gain. I became a student of cities, development, business, leadership, and community building, learning from workshops, mentors, projects, successes, failures, and experience. I'm still studying.

I jokingly called my first development project "335 University" because the education was happening in real time. Simultaneously to starting a business, and investing into real estate I was attending every industry conference, meeting, proved my father right by taking Business Fundamentals at Burton Barr Library to learn advanced Microsoft Excel techniques. I asked people I admired to coffee, asked questions, listened and learned.

When it came time to launch Harder Development, my father advised helping me secure my first loan and then stepped back. His guidance was: "I don't want to take away your opportunity to figure it out."

At the time, it felt like being thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim.

After some initial panic, I realized I may instinctively know how to tread water. That maybe by just being my father's daughter, I had been learning lessons about building businesses, creating partnerships, leading people, solving problems, and taking calculated risks.

I found my own approach. I figured it out.

Years later, when a project succeeded or a milestone was reached, he'd proudly say, "Look, you did that!"

Figuring it out, one brick at a time. Salvaging and reusing materials at my first project in 2010.

My father is about to turn 83 and remains firmly in the "never retire" camp. We both have what he calls entrepreneurial enthusiasm: the energy and vision to keep working toward our goals and believing the next idea is worth exploring.

When I look at what he's created and what he's still building, I get to be the one to proudly think, "Wow, he did that."

One of his core beliefs in business, and one that I share, is simple: people come first.

He often says that the single most important factor in any venture is the quality of the people involved. Markets matter. Ideas matter. Innovation matters. But people matter most.

As I navigate an increasingly complex business and political environment, I'm so grateful for the example my parents set. I watched my father work hard, my mother sacrifice and I know deeply that success doesn’t happen overnight. Together, they taught me that lasting success requires vision, grit, sacrifice, and the ability to work with people.

Today, my father is still the one telling me about new technologies before they ever show up in my feed. Long before most of us had heard about OpenAI, he was showing me how AI could write a poem in ten different literary styles in a matter of seconds. What interested him most wasn't the novelty of it, it was the implications, and asking what would come next.

That curiosity, optimism, and willingness to risk and advance ideas has influenced me more than I realized when starting out.

And on Father's Day, I'm grateful for his guidance, his belief in me, and the confidence he's given me to aim high, believe in possibility, tune out the noise, and stay focused on what matters.

As a kid, I didn't know development was a career path. I certainly didn't know there was a place for women in the industry. Looking back, I realize that my willingness to start a company, take risks, and build something from little comes from watching my father do exactly that.

Certainly not by following his path, but by learning how to find my own.

For that, and so much more, I'm grateful.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

Me asleep on my Dad in 1982.

Long before the businesses, the ideas, the lessons, and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm, there was this.