Sean Suttle: Welcome to the Construction Collective where we bring together voices from across the industry to talk about what’s really shaping construction today. I’m your host, Sean Suttle from Hanlin Rainaldi Construction. And we’re diving into a topic that’s both meaningful and timely, leadership and resilience in a changing industry. And I’m joined by three incredible guests, who are not only building successful companies, but also redefining what leadership looks like in commercial construction. Jessica Anderson, President of Anderson Concrete, Alice Martin, Vice President of Business Development at Martin Painting, and Rachel Schank, Director of Marketing at Hanlin Rainaldi Construction. So thank you everyone for being here, and before we kick it off and get into the nitty gritty with Halloween being tomorrow, I’m going to ask everyone what your most favorite and your least favorite Halloween candy is. So Rachel, I’ll let you kick it off.
Rachel Schank: All right. I have to say candy corn. I know it’s not a crowd favorite, that’s your most favorite Halloween, because it’s like special to Halloween, you don’t really get it year ’round. And I like the little pumpkins, pumpkin shaped ones.
Sean Suttle: Maybe there’s a reason you only get it at Halloween, [laugh],
Rachel Schank: because it’s so special. Jessica, how about you? What’s your, what’s your most favorite?
Jessica Anderson: Favorite? I’m a York peppermint, wow, okay,
Alice: those you can get year ’round.
Sean: Your least favorite,
Jessica: I, I absolutely hate licorice, black licorice.
Sean: Wow, okay, that’s interesting. I grew up in an Italian family, so there was a lot of anise around with pizzelles, so I sort of like that black liquorish flavor. Alice?
Alice Martin: My favorite, I mean, anything chocolate to be completely guilty, [laugh], but Take Five. I think it’s a good balance. Oh, it’s my favorite.
Sean: That’s such an, I think that’s an underrated candy bar. The Take Five is…
Alice: They used to have them in my high school, and I would get one, like, every other day. And ever since then, I’ve just been hooked.
Sean: They’re so good. It’s like chocolate pretzel, some crispy wafer, yeah, some kind of a coffee, I don’t know what’s
Jessica: I hope some of my nephews collect some of that. Oh my god, trick or treat, yeah,
Alice: I saw that Reese’s is also doing a Take Five version now so… with pretzels.
Sean: Oh my gosh, and then they also have since we’re on a pretzel kick. Now is the M&M’s have the pretzel shell ones. Have you ever had those? No, really good
Alice: On the inside or outside?
Sean: The outside. Okay, really, really good. My favorite is Snickers and my least favorite is candy corn. I just, I don’t like it.
Rachel: Joe’s cheering in the production booth. Because you said candy corn sucks. Yeah.
Joe: [Muffled] Candy Corn sucks!
Sean: Yeah, I would agree with that, not a not a fan, not a fan. So, Alice give everyone just a, I did a quick introduction, but just give us a little bit about your, your day to day role, and what your company focuses on, and, and what you guys do.
Alice: Yeah, so our company Martin Painting and Coating, we’ve been around for 73 years now. We do all painting and coating anything except for residential. So we, kind of, say anything but your house or your car, we will figure out a way to get it painted. So a lot of buildings around the area, our focus is central Ohio, Columbus, but we do go outside of that range. A lot of new builds, you know, for general contractors, we will bid on those projects and, and do the painting and coding, but also, like, direct for owner. So if it’s somebody who owns the dentist office we’ll also, do those repaints. Then on the industrial side we have sandblasting and painting and coating more on the high performance side. We have an in-shop service department where we do a lot of that.
Sean: And then you have multiple buildings where you do… on site. All that sandblasting, recoating and things like that. In terms of that kind of stuff, is there a lot of firms that do that or is that like really a specialty? Like do you a lot of people come to you for that?
Alice: It’s pretty specialty just because it’s not very common. Yeah. I would say in the area, we have the space to do it, so that’s in our benefit, a lot of like patio furniture and things like that where people will want that sandblasted and painted. That might be a little bit easier of a reach, but it’s harder, I think for people to find that service just in general.
Sean: I’m taking some good notes because I have some questions about how you find that labor to do some of those specially things. So we’ll come back to that. Thank you, for sharing. Jessica, how about you? Give us a little bit of background on what you do and what Anderson concrete does?
Jessica: Yeah, Anderson Concrete is a concrete producer, so we’re making the concrete, we’re hauling it to the job site. Misconception is, we’re not the one finishing the concrete. That’s, you know, our concrete contractors are the ones doing that, but we’re the one manufacturing, making the product.
Sean: For the lay people out there the finishers place the concrete. Jessica’s company brings it and it comes out of the chute for them to form in place.
Jessica: Yes. So Anderson Concrete is 104 years old, founded in 1921. I’m a fourth generation owner of the family business, and I’ve been involved with the company since I was 19 years old. [Wow!] So throughout college, and that wasn’t really my career path, but I started and never left.
Sean: What was the first thing do you remember the first job you had?
Jessica: Oh, I remember first day on the job. I showed up to the office, and the office staff thought I was an auditor. Nobody told me the dress code, so I was a little over, a little overdressed and so learned that on the first day. But, yeah, I started kind of as an intern in the accounting department, and the controller at the time put a big box in front of me and said, start filing.
Sean: You should have played that off. You should have said, I am here to audit you. Please give me all of your files. See how long before somebody called you on it.
Jessica: You’re asking more about the company history, but, yeah, we are a concrete producer. Our sister company is Buckeye Ready Mix. [Okay.] Both companies are concrete producers. We do the same thing just in slightly different markets. Anderson Concrete focuses on Columbus, Franklin County, loosely like inside 270 and then Buckeye Ready Mix does the same thing in like outlying communities. [Okay.] So our reach goes up to Upper Sandusky, goes east to Newark, west to West Jeff and we go south to Lockbourne, Lancaster. But just in the last month or so we just opened a plant in Jeffersonville, so we’re reaching a little further south.
Sean: So do you think with opening that plant in Jeffersonville, like some of those tertiary markets like the future of Columbus in that growth, do you see more growth in those tertiary markets?
Jessica: For sure, for sure, the growth of Columbus has obviously just continued to spread and with the battery plant going in, and Jeffersonville kind of connecting Columbus to Cincinnati, there’s a ton of development in that market, and so we’re shifting a little further south.
Sean: That’s right off of 71, right? So I drove, I was in Springboro this morning and so I was driving back and I passed that factory and there’s a plant there and a bunch of trucks. Is that? [Yup.] So cause I was like, ‘wow, they’re doing a lot of earthwork and I’m like, there’s no way all those trucks are parked there for this project.” And then I saw the stacks in the back and I was I figured…
Jessica: A lot of data center, a lot of warehouse.
Sean: And do you think, this is how this conversation is going to go I’m just going to get sidetracked all over the place, so do you think like those tertiary markets are going to get busier because some of the suburbs are saying, are shutting down the data centers, like I just said, Jerome Township said “no more”, maybe Hillard are cutting them out, so do you think that’s where those data centers are going to be going next, in those communities?
Jessica: It’s kind of hard to tell which direction it’s going now. It seems like every day the news kind of changes, but with the high-profile projects, the Intels, the Andurils, the battery plants and things like that, there’s just more and more companies coming to Columbus and wanting to make Columbus their, their home base. And the data, yeah, the data centers have just exploded.
Sean: And we just, Rachel, SMPS, just hosted a panel, where we where… Doug.
Rachel: Doug McCollough from Beta District.
Sean: He was talking about the need for these micro warehouses and I almost call it like middle warehousing, like with missing middle housing and all these communities, right? But he said there’s such a need for like 5,000 to 10,000 square foot warehouses because all these companies like Andruril and Intel, they have all these little offshoots where they might have like an R&D product they want to go and try to develop. They don’t need 100,000 square feet, they need 5,000, 10,000 to see if it works. So, thank you for the introduction. Rachel, give us an introduction. What do you do?
Rachel: I’m Director of Marketing for Hanlin Rainaldi. And what’s that like? Well, we’re a commercial general contractor and we build for businesses, all types of businesses. What, what what types of markets. Ah, wow, we do a lot of restaurant, retail, office space, industrial, we do it all. We are mutts.
Sean: That’s sort of an inside joke. As we talk about marketing, you know a lot of people say you got to focus on one thing. What are you good at? You know are you an office builder? Are you a restaurant builder? You retail builder? And I said we do them all because I don’t know, I lived through the Great Recession, right? When Hanlin did a ton of retail back in that time. And then with the onset of e-commerce and malls going away, those shops all went away. And so the business really took a drastic dip because the market changed. So I like being involved in churches and schools and industrial just, just in case. So thanks, Rachel. Yeah, right, right, more opportunities. And as the sales guy, you know you want to keep the pipeline full. That’s the thing that keeps me up at night, right, is, do we have work coming in? Now a lot of times our operations department and our estimate department will say, why are we doing this? Why do we do it? I’m like, well, let’s just let’s see let’s bid it and see what happens.
Rachel: Always something new and exciting from the marketing perspective.
Sean: Right! So it’s been a busy couple years, materials, interest rates, schedule, labor, everything seems to move faster, and cost more. And so in a really broad sense, Alice, what do you think that, what has that meant for Martin painting? Is it trying to stay ahead of the pricing to make sure you’re staying ahead of the material costs? I know everybody is fighting labor costs, right? There’s a labor shortage which means labor’s more expensive. Do you do you have to tell clients, you know that you normally would work with that, hey, we can’t turn this around because we don’t have the time, the money, or the material or the people to do it. What are some of those challenges?
Alice: Yeah, I mean I think all of those are challenges. We try to do a good job up front, looking at what is it going to take to get this project done the right way for this specific client. So that’s, that means a lot of things, [right], but for us, it’s number of people on site because you’re talking about labor rates. [Right]. That’s one thing that, you know do we need three painters or can we get it done with two? And what does that look like cost wise? Like, can we put that in our bid or do we have to have that many people there? The cost of, like, material going up, and, you know for us, lift work, we work out of boom lift, scissor lift those types of things. We just try to have constant communication with our clients, because we do have a lot of repeat business fortunately. We have been very blessed that they’re understanding of that because they’re also facing it. [Right.] Just being in the commercial setting, you know they’re, they’re aware of it. They’re having to deal with that themselves within their own space. So their understanding of cost going up for things.
Sean: So that’s great that clients are more aware, I always think in our industry, and maybe it’s every industry, you know we are still driven by low price, right? A lot of the stuff what we do is we’ll bid some work, some of its negotiated just like what you guys do. Yeah. Which is great because then it’s, you know, a very candid open book conversation. Here’s our cost, we’ll show it to you, you know we’ve got competition across the trades. But, you know does, do you think, with those with those types of clients, do you try to work more with those types of clients than doing bid work, or do you do you do it all. The type of clients that you’re saying that negotiate? That you can negotiate with and understand the service?
Alice: Oh yeah, yeah absolutely we’re more collaborative for sure. A lot of, like you’re saying, you want the best price you possibly can get. Right. And I see that and, you know, we see that and understand that. From the lens of Martin painting, we are all about quality and a lot of, like you see developers coming in and building, but they don’t know who the tenants going to be, they don’t know who’s going to be renting out. So it’s build it, get it done, let’s move on. [Yeah] And fortunately for us that has kind of shifted because we are a finish trade, yeah, you know we are doing the final the final application. You’re touching it last, So for us, it’s been it’s been awesome being able to collaborate with those people that want that finish work to be perfect for their for the owner. [right] So it’s kind of shifted a little bit more, with not as many developers, I guess, that we’re seeing, so more collaborative and more, you know: This is going to come up. How do we face it? Let’s get ahead of it, and what does that cost and what is that realistically look like?
Sean: I feel like with, you know, the labor issue and you guys are an established company, you offer a service that you stand behind, and hopefully that would provide a warm fuzzy for the client that you’re going to get it done one way or another, you’re going to do the right thing, you’re not going to bid it at a low price, and not be able to finish the job or do it with the quality that, you say you can do it. What about you, Jessica? You’re sort of you know you’re a little bit in a different game with providing material, but, and you probably have a little more competition, but, I mean how much, is there a lot of competition for ready mix in central Ohio?
Jessica: In central Ohio, I was doing the quick math, I mean between five and, more than five, less than 10 concrete producers in this market. [Okay.] But the competition is, is really tight. Being a material supplier, we are maybe a little different, but, the majority of the work that we do is bid work with regular customers. We don’t always deal directly with the GC, right? We’re dealing with the concrete contractors most of the time. So generally, we’re one step removed from working directly with the GC most of the time. But, you know the majority of our work that we do, especially at Anderson concrete is, we do a lot of specialized work, we do a lot of like really highly technical work.
Sean: So you’re talking in terms of concrete mixes required for certain types of applications.
Jessica: Yeah. A lot of highly technical work where there’s a lot of collaboration that needs to go into it. So that’s a little less price driven, a little more collaborative, but, you know for the for the day-to-day concrete projects it’s still very price driven for sure.
Sean: Was there, I remember when Intel was first announced and it’s first started to get going, everyone was like, well, you’re not, Hanlin Rainaldi, you guys aren’t going to be able to get concrete for your small projects because everything is getting allocated to Intel. Was that true? Did that happen for a short time when that was going on?
Jessica: That was definitely the fear. And at that time there was a little bit of a misperception, misunderstanding of where the shortage was coming from. Couple years ago, you know there was a shortage on the cement side. Okay, so, you know cement is a product, an ingredient that goes into concrete. And most of the time people don’t know that’s a difference between cement and concrete, so they use the words interchangeably. And so even, you know on the news a couple times they’re like, “there’s a concrete shortage! There’s a concrete shortage!” Well, it wasn’t quite true. We weren’t able to get the materials needed to make the concrete. And so that was kind of a misconception there.
Sean: What was driving that? Was that the producers?
Jessica: It was a perfect storm a couple years ago. It was supply and demand. It was logistics. A lot of the material, a lot of the cement, comes in by rail or by barge and there was a perfect storm of logistics challenges there.
Sean: Does that become like a, now I’m going to get into the nerdy details of it, does that become like a bidding war for concrete producers when they’re like, hey, there’s only so much cement and we need it, and then you have to buy it at a higher price and then be sure that you’re going to be able to sell it to your…
Jessica: Having relationships with our suppliers is very, very important and try to remain diversified in the materials that we’re getting. [Right.] The myth that, that project was going to take all the concrete was a little blown out of proportion, right, because, you know we, we maybe had some service changes and we had to adjust to meeting that demand, but it did not take all of the concrete. [Yeah, well, I mean it’s.]
Rachel: We kept building!
Sean: I mean it’s interesting to see where that is right now, and sort of you know, nobody really knows is it going to come online? What’s going to happen? And I feel like that was such a, when it happened it was like, oh my gosh, we’re going to have work in central Ohio for the next 100 years. And now it’s like, oh yeah, nothing’s guaranteed. Rachel, what supply issues do you have on the marketing side?
Rachel: I really like what Jessica said about diversifying who you use as your suppliers because that’s something I had to learn the hard way as a marketer. You’ve got to diversify, you have to have multiple people that you work with. I mean we do the same thing with our, you know there’s, there’s definitely certain subcontractors we like working with that we know are going to get the job done. But, we want to spread the wealth so we can make sure we’re getting the most competitive pricing, you know for our clients. So sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but, yeah so, I’m going to ask the next question which is what’s keeping you up at night as a business owner? How have the last 12 to 18 months, changed the way you bid projects, the way you’re planning for your company? How are your clients and contractors adapting, more collaborative, more price driven? And overall, where do you see the market right now in central Ohio? Sort of a lot of questions in there…
Jessica: How long is this podcast?
Sean: We’ve got 40 minutes left, so go nuts.
Alice: Yeah, I mean I would say it’s, it’s kind of similar to, like, the topic that we’re on with, with pricing. Like, I always worry about, you know we are not corporate, we are a small business, right? We’re a large painting contractor, but we’re still a small business, so I always think about, like, the money going out, where is it going? Can it be more effective, you know actually on the projects, you know? Where exactly can we hold back or be, you know a little bit tighter?
Sean: More efficient to raise the bottom.
Alice: Yeah, more efficient whether that’s, you know on, on job sites or in the office. Like, do we need these specific programs or can we invest in something that’s going to make us more efficient, you know downstream? So what keeps me up at night, I think would be, number one for me in my position, cause I do a lot of our hiring, is having the best painters and having the best training. So I never want us to scramble to say, hey, we don’t have painters for this drop site. Like, that is my worst nightmare. [laugh]
Sean:Yeah, it’s not being able to staff the work that you have.
Alice: Yeah, it’s ebb and flow. I mean as you guys know, being, you know in Columbus, but also in this industry, not every day is the same, not every season is the same, But with us, it can be it can be day to day, you know like we could be totally fine and all of our painters are working and then that’s Monday, come Wednesday, we need 10 more painters, you know this project is, they’re wanting to ramp this back up. And, so I like to have like people kind of on the bench so whenever we need to pull the trigger, we can. That’s probably the biggest thing for me just with my seat in the in the company. But overall, like planning for the future and like the company itself, making sure you have the right people in the right seat is huge for any business, it really in any industry, but in small business for sure because the smaller it is, the more personal it is. And we want our clients to know that whoever you have on your account, they have your best interest. [Yes.] Truly. And it’s not, we don’t micromanage, that’s just not our culture. So we want to trust our people and be able.
Sean: To be able to interact on that frontline with the clients.
Alice: And be professional and be honest and collaborative and all those things.
Sean: In terms of planning for the future, when we met prior to this podcast, you, I don’t I can’t remember, do you do EOS or do you do some form of EOS or did you?
Alice: Yeah, yeah, we do, we run on EOS, we started implementing it and then Covid happened so we started self-implementing from that point on. But we have our leadership meetings every Monday, we actually have our quarterly tomorrow, so, yeah, we don’t have our individual like departmental meetings quite yet, but we have a score card and EOS has been fantastic.
Sean: And I think, and, and maybe Jessica, you could talk to some of this to being a fourth generation person in the company and just how companies evolve. I remember, you know before I had ownership in Hanlin, everything was sort of very secretive in terms of profitability and what we’re doing. And that has changed so much. And I think you know you’re talking about, you know your painters being the front line with the clients, like the education, like bringing those guys in, letting them know exactly what’s going on. And we’re much smaller than Anderson Concrete, but like bringing those guys in, letting them know, hey, here’s where we’re at halfway through the year, quarter way through the year, here’s where we’re driving, here’s the clients we’re going after, the years looking, you know just as good as last year. Hey, we’re just, we’re down a little bit, but things are great. We still have a ton of work in the pipeline. You know, if, you know anyone who’s looking for work, make sure you’re asking our clients, you know and remember, you’re the front line. We’re not going to get this work again unless you’re doing what we’re selling. So, I think it’s the communication with employees across the board that I’ve seen, you know since I started in 2005, the mindset around that has changed to some degree. So yeah, that’s a good point. So what’s keeping you up at night?
Jessica: Oh my gosh, [laugh], I don’t sleep a whole lot. [laugh], The top of the list is, just risk, and from a couple different standpoints, thinking of it in terms of our, our team and our people. We have a lot of risk every single day, literally, like rolling down the road, whether it’s in a concrete mixer or at the plant level. Oh my gosh. Just, you know from a safety standpoint, you know like I, I lose a lot of sleep, and, you know the worst thing ever is when you get the middle of the night phone call where there’s been an accident or whatever. And so, you know that just the, the risk that we take on every day as a team is something that keeps me up, but then also the, just the liability and the product specific risk that we take on, Every day, every project is just, sometimes you forget the amount of risk, and, you know you have a situation that comes up recently that just kind of reminded us how much risk we’re taking on. And even the projects that you don’t think are high risk, you know if you look at, like, the North Market Tower downtown, or if you look at, you know the bridge going through downtown, you think of those as your, your high risk projects, but sometimes it can be a much smaller project that you didn’t even think would be such a high risk, and that it’s just been a, a little reminder of the amount of risk that we take on every day.
Sean: That is so true. I, I was, so couple things, we always say, I always tell our people, like, at the end of the day, everybody comes home. I really, I don’t care about anything else. All the other problems that you might think are problems. They’re not problems compared to that, that everyone comes home safe. And so I’m sure you do the same thing when I go out to job sites. I’m like, you see everything. It’s, and I think you have to have, as an owner in this industry, you have to be heightened when you go out to the job sites, cause you’re thinking about worst case scenario all the time. [I do.] My wife always tells me that, like, why do you why does your head go to always the worst case scenario? I go, well, I want to know what the worst case scenario is so, one, I’m prepared for it and we could try to prevent it. That risk is, I think as an owner, you have to really be able to compartmentalize it and put it in the back. You have to be aware of it, you have to train for it, you have to put your people in the in the right spots to recognize it. But then you just have to go about your day, like it is, otherwise, you won’t be able to function, you’d be paralyzed by fear. And I was talking I was talking to a… [that happens. Yeah] I was talking to someone yesterday who was telling me this is again, I’m going to go off a tangent, he was talking about a TikTok shop, and they were selling, like, I don’t know what they were selling, like, on TikTok Live. And I don’t even know what this is, but he was saying this guy’s making like $2,000 a day, like, doing these like selling these trinkets on TikTok Live. And I’m like, why am I not doing that? That sounds so much easier than what I’m doing. Yeah, but I think, you know that being said, I also think, and I’m sure you both get a ton of satisfaction when you have a finished product and you’re going there and you’re looking at that and you’re like, look at what we did! I mean I know you guys work in some crazy situations. You’re working on some really, you know intense big projects throughout the city that are, you know reshaping, you know what Columbus is going to be. And, you know that is a really cool thing at the end of it when you see…
Jessica: It makes it worth it in the end when you can look at the work you’ve done throughout the city and it’s, we’re very proud to do that. [Yeah.]
Rachel: Are you guys able to find the time to like zoom out, kind of look at it cause I, we talk about this all the time, sometimes it feels like it’s just dealing with fires all day long and it can be hard to take, we’re just talking about this, take some time to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what you’ve accomplished. Yeah. Can you can find that time to do that? [laugh]
Alice: I think, yeah, I mean not, not every day, probably not even every month, but, I feel like I am because I am a family, I’m a family member in the business, and I get to see, like, for me, I get to see other people be so proud of what they’ve accomplished. And I want to make sure that I’m pointing that out for them so that they focus on the bigger picture, and why does Martin Painting exist? You know it’s, it’s way more than just paint, so I think that I like to point it out for other people, so it heightens my awareness about it. So, but not every day. It’s really hard to focus on that.
Jessica: When I drive around Columbus and I see one of our trucks, I mean that is my first thought every time, is [!] Right, yeah, and so that’s just always been like a constant reminder when you see the projects or if you see the truck going down the road, it’s just I’m really proud of what we do.
Sean: Yeah, and, I mean both of your firms have been around for so long, which is, I mean that’s crazy to think, you know 73 years and 100 years, I mean… [104] that’s insane. And Rachel and I were just talking about this. I was talking to a mentor and he’s, he had made a comment, like, you know I used to sit in my office for just, you know five or six hours, and people would be like, what’s he doing in there? He’s not doing anything, he’s just in there screwing around. He’s like, and I would just think, I’d just think about the business, and think about what we had to do, and think about all the things, and I was telling Rachel, I feel like that’s one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur is just to take that time and find that time, and make the time really is what it is, and think about your business and where you want to go and what you want to do. And I want to be more cognizant of that, and then just to speak to like the family side of the business. You know when, when I bought Hanlin Rainaldi, it was, you know Ed Rainaldi, Mike Hanlin, and Grant Douglass, and it had been founded in 1992. And my, one of my biggest fears was don’t screw this up, like don’t drop the ball. Like they, and it’s and you don’t realize how hard this industry is until you actually get into it. And there’s a lot of luck that goes into, you know being successful, right? You’ve got to do all the right things, but there’s a certain amount of luck. So do you feel a lot of pressure just with, you know the family carrying on the business and being the one to like, hey, I want to make sure we hand this over to the next person. Yeah. And wait, you guys are, wait, are you?
Alice: We are employee owned. Yeah, so now you’re an ESOP. Yeah, yeah we, in 2021, we became an ESOP, so that changed the structure of our business. But, you know I used to feel a lot of that, I really did, up until more recently, we, we just have such a strong leadership team and we all bring so much to the table where you’re not afraid to freely think and have these ideas and workshop it, but you don’t feel so alone, right? So I am coming from a place of gratitude for sure when it comes to that, but just I think just being a family member, you have this pressure on you, whether it’s from the outside world or internally from yourself, it’s not going to ever go away just because you are you are a family member. So you just try to do the next right thing. [Yeah]
Jessica: It is a tremendous weight to carry for sure, I won’t even try to downplay that. But exactly what Alice said, we have a fantastic leadership team at both companies at Anderson and Buckeye. And as a family, we would not be able to do without the leadership team. You asked a little while ago about what keeps, keeps us up at night and the succession planning of trying to make sure we have that leadership team continue to be strong is one of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, and losing sleep over is, you know how do we replace these people that have spent their entire career here? We have a lot of really tenured people. They bring a lot of experience, which is fantastic, but then when you have to replace them, [right, yeah] it’s really, really hard. And so that’s…
Sean: Jessica, you just have to plan your exit with their exit. Right? [laughter]
Jessica: I’ve come up through the industry with a lot of them and that’s that’s really, really challenging.
Sean: I think that’s another thing like the succession planning that people don’t think about because you’re thinking about the now and getting through the next month, six months, year to really step back and focus and say, what’s this going to look like in 10 years is another really tough thing to do. And I you know and I think that, you know going back to having strong leadership teams and, and great mentors. I think sometimes we get stuck in this black hole of, like, the day-to-day and issues and the problems. But when you talk to other people in the industry and mentor, I mean that’s why I like this podcast, right? Because then you sort of walk away feeling a little more energized. Like, all right, I’m not the only one who feels these, these issues. And, you know you talked a little bit about gratitude. I’m a big gratitude person to say, I’m thankful for everything we have. So
Jessica: Alice and I both belong to the Conway Center for Family Business, and it’s been tremendously helpful for me, yeah, sure for you too. But one of the things that I’ve Learned and that they preach, and it’s probably applicable to non-family businesses too. But trying to, as an owner get out of the day to day as much as you can. Work on the business, not in the business. And that’s been such a hard thing for me to shift from, because I, I was very much in the day-to- day business. I was the controller of our precast division for 18 years, and then, to shift into the role I’m in now. That’s been probably the hardest thing for me to get, like, try to get out of the weeds and see the, like, big picture, see the, the forest for the trees, and just to think differently. Yeah, like you said, trying to find, like, the time to think about things when you’re also trying to, like, fight all the fires, right, really hard. And that and that’s a hard thing to do, I mean especially for someone who started in the business working, you know in the trenches. So to say to be on, you know on top, cause everybody else says that be on top of the business, not in the business. It’s a very different way of thinking and I, I mean I’m still working on it, but like you have to like retrain your brain. It’s deliberate. Yeah, it’s deliberate. Rachel, you’re relatively new to the construction industry, right? So Rachel’s background, I love telling this story because Rachel is such an integral part of our organization, and I always say she’s the keeper of our culture. So Rachel’s my neighbor and I would always be-moan to my wife, like, I need to do something on social media to, and, but I’m not a social media person. And she’s like, you need to hire someone you need to hire someone I’m like, well, easier said than going back to the other point. We’re saying, like, with people on the bench, like that’s another hard thing to do as an opportunity to hire the people for the work you think is coming in. And so, there’s a ladies night, which I think there’s one every weekend in our neighborhood. Every month. Not every night, but every weekend. But, Amanda came home and she said, you’ve got to hire Rachel, she’s going to do your marketing. And I said, okay. So you started part time, you’re doing some of your own consulting in different industries. And so tell us a little bit about, you know you’ve heard us talk about construction.
Rachel: I feel we already covered this in episode one.
Sean: But, like, but I’m bringing it back for Jessica and Alice, like how, how is construction, like what would you say? How is construction different than some of the other industries that you’ve worked in?
Rachel: It’s just so much more relationship driven. Like so a lot of the industries there is, you know that, of course there’s client relationships and you’re trying to build great client relationships, but it’s more than that in this industry. It’s, it’s just a really tight network of people and everybody knows everybody else and it’s all somehow related to each other. Whereas, you know it’s not like a one on one, you and the client kind of situation.
Sean: It’s for as big as Columbus is, this the construction community is very small. Everybody knows everyone.
Rachel: An example would be like when I was first starting out and I was trying to figure out, you know from on the inside where were clients coming from because, you know I knew, of course, a lot of them came from the relationships that are, you know you have, our preconstruction director has, our founder Ed has. Yep. I was trying to figure out some of the new things I was doing were working, of course, right? You know and I can look at all the numbers, but that doesn’t, at the end of the day, who is it bringing in the door? And if that was such an impossible task because it’s like, well, they might have looked at our website, but then they called so and so to see if they know anything about so and so, and it turned into such a like trying to back track from this person in this project back to how do they hear about us, in this industry, is near impossible. Because again, it just hits that network and it spreads out.
Sean: Just trying to get the analytics.
Rachel: There’s like 20 people who’ve touched it in between, you know?
Sean: you know cause we’re not selling widgets and every project is different. You know just like Jessica was talking about the different construction mixes, like they probably get clients who come in and say, we need this. And you’re like, what the hell, I don’t know. Like how do we do this? If you get an engineer to develop some mix and you test it and you hope it works. In the same with coating, you have a product you need to coat and like is this going to work out, yeah, yeah yeah very, very interesting. Okay, so we’ve been all over the place, and I still have labor talent and retention to talk about and just women in construction and future, the industry and rapid fire questions. So I’m going to since we’re 40 minutes into this, I’m going to sort of I’m going to just sort of rapid fire. We’ve talked about, we’ve talked about talent, we’ve talked about, finding people. What, what are some of the things in your company, Alice, that you do from a culture standpoint to retain your employees? Like, why do you think people want to stay at Martin Painting instead of going to that next for, you know for more money?
Alice: The other contractor? Yeah, so for us, what, what’s gotten us a lot of traction is defining our core values. You know you, you know what they are, but writing them down and communicating them is such a big step that sounds so easy, but, but it’s not. We did that a couple years ago. We identified our core values, wrote them down, they’re on all of our ads, they’re on our website, and we talk about them in every meeting that we have. , so that has really just driven it down to the way that we hire, the way that we select clients, the way that we don’t select clients.
Sean: So you do it you do it both. It’s for employees and for clients.
Alice: Yeah, yeah it’s, we call it our compass. So our core values, we call them the right core values cause it’s respect, integrity, teamwork, and effort, okay, which we have our own definitions for. And we always say, like, it’s the right fit, not only the right fit for Martin painting, but the right fit as the acronym for our core values or the right client, which is a great reminder. [Yeah.[ So it’s just really become our compass for everything that we do, how we interact with each other and just the expectations. Do you see the people like your employees in the field, do they ever come back to you and say, this is we did it this way because it’s the right way to do it. Like. In so many words, [yeah] we have we have core values examples every week in our meeting. And whoever you have as your core value example, like, you, you’re supposed to go tell them like, hey, I saw you doing this and I wanted just to have this conversation. And so more people have been doing that throughout the business.
Sean: Rachel and I just had a conversation yesterday. We posted a project that we’re working on in Reynoldsburg and a lot of times on our Instagram feed we’ll recognize the superintendent and the project manager. And one of our values is celebrating successes. And so we posted that and somebody said, aren’t you afraid, like you’re putting these names out there that somebody’s going to see that and try to poach these guys? And I called Rachel and I was like, I am scared. And then I was like, and she was like, well, this is one of our values. Like this is how we celebrate these guys. And I was like, you know what if they, you know people and recruiters will find them, right? Or somebody will find them. So,
Alice: it’s a risk, but you also have to, you have to take the risk sometimes because I’m sure what did that do for that individual? It probably made them feel amazing,
Sean: they do, they love it.
Alice: Yeah, and they want to stay places where they feel amazing, right?
Sean: And they want to share that with not only, you know you know, other people they’re connected with on those social channels, but like their family. Like that’s a that’s a proud, like we want them to be proud of these projects they do. How about you, Jessica? They would tell us all about your culture and how that helps retain.
Jessica: Well, I won’t reiterate what Alice said, but you know we did the same thing. We did the deep dive into our values a couple years ago and it was interesting because, I think we’ve had the culture for a long time but we never like put words and statements to them. Yeah, and, you know once we finally defined them, that was the first step, and then, you know you put them on the wall and, you know that was the first step, but we’ve really been trying to be very intentional the last couple years of practicing, like living by our values, hiring by our values, promoting by our values. Like, you know really, really living them and making sure that we’re aligned with the, the people that were bringing on to the team. So that’s, you know a huge part of it. I mentioned before that we have a very, like, tenured team and we try very hard to promote from within. You know there’s only so many positions and so many places to go, but we try and for the most part, we, we promote from within.
Sean: Do those guys do your guys do your tenured guys do you have like an in-house training program where you try to bring some young folks in and, and have these guys, cause I’ve seen, I’m sure you both have, like, when I first started in the industry, it was a little different, right? It was, guys would be on the job site at six in the morning and they would be there till six at night. And it was whatever it took to get done. And that was a sense of pride. And then it sort of changed, right? And why did it change? Because now you have both parents working and people got to be home. And, you know as I’ve given that a lot of thought, I’ve been like well, why should people in our industry be held to different standards, right? Like they should have to go to work, be there at seven and be done by four, right? And be and have these. But it’s, it’s still, I think, expected of us to get the you know to get the job done. And again, I don’t know what it’s like in other industries. I just feel like it, it’s like that in mine. So we’ve kicked that idea around of like, hey, we want these old guys to train these young guys, but the mentality is so different, right? And, and, it’s like, how do you mesh, how do you get those guys who are the old school hardcore guys who did it this way to mesh with these guys? Right, cause these guys have so much knowledge that these guys need.
Rachel: Yeah, you guys bringing in younger workers?
Jessica: yeah, we, we there’s a lot to answer there. We have totally revamped our training program , the last couple years, and just, kind of rethought our whole training process. And it, kind of goes back to that, like, we need to train differently now, right than we used to. And, you, you mentioned something a minute ago about, you know going home at regular hours. Yeah, whatever, we don’t have that, we are a 24: 7 operation. Our team works very, very long, very irregular hours, and so it’s really, really stressful. And back to the, your question about company culture. It’s, it’s really, really challenging to, talk about the health and well-being of your workforce. And, you know we can say work life balance all we want, but, you know it’s a very stressful job, very demanding job, and so that doesn’t really allow for that based on the nature of the work. It’s really, really hard, yeah, really, really hard and so we’ve been trying to figure out ways to address that cause we can’t really change the hours that our client wants to work. We can’t really change the day of the week that they want to pour, right? We can’t we don’t have a lot of control over that. You don’t have control of the weather when you miss days to pour and you need to make time up. All those things. I mean we’re doing things like trying to make sure that our team understands mental health and the resources to where to go if they need help. We’ve spent a lot of time here, that’s, that’s been kind of our initiative here the last year is focusing on mental health and trying to make sure that our team has that despite the stress and the challenges that they have to deal with, and, like, help helping them cope and manage all of that.
Sean: That has been a big push in our industry over the past. I would say recently five years or maybe, maybe less. And so do you think that there’s more resources around that with, with just the health and wellness? You know with the physical and mental…?
Jessica: I’ve noticed it really just in the last couple years. We did just internally, we do an employee survey every year that we started doing that couple years ago back to your culture. We try to get, you know feedback and input from our team. And that’s been our most successful way of, like, gauging the pulse on certain things. Right? But a couple years ago, we asked if they knew what, resources were available to them. We said, you know do you know where to access your EAP Employee Assistance Program? And most of them did not know. And so we’re like, oh, that’s what we need to focus on is making sure they know what this is and where to access it. And so that was kind of where we took our lead to like go down that path to really dive in on the mental health. And we’ve partnered with a couple people, The Builders Exchange, [Yep,] of Central Ohio has been diving into the mental health space. They have a peer group now specifically for that. There’s, there’s people that have really been driving that conversation to try to reduce the stigma, [yeah,] in the construction industry about talking about things like that. And so we’re fully on board. And, you know I think a lot of our team appreciates that and sees it. [I’m sure.] You know really, appreciates it. And so that’s been a driving force of our culture here recently.
Sean: And, you know I think it goes and there’s, we still have a long way to go, right? But we’re making we’re making headway in that in that space. And if you know better, you do better. Right, it wasn’t…
Rachel: Talking about it.
Sean: Yeah, cause it’s a cause again it goes back to where it’s what we do is very challenging, demanding. And I think it’s, like, nothing else and
Rachel: it is definitely a very high-stress industry. I mean it is yeah, it’s worth acknowledging that, that everybody who comes in, because you’re your problem solving, and there’s no industry where your problem solving, yeah, where there’s not going to be stress involved in that problem solving process. It’s just not possible. Well, I mean it’s awesome cause I love having these talks, like, wrote it down here. But, yeah, leadership looks a lot different today than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago. And I think, you know people in the industry who embrace that are the ones who are going to rise to the top and have those employees…I mean because let’s face it, you know or if we’re not here, if we don’t have the employees who, who are out there doing that, that work. So, yeah, alright, man, we are really, this conversation is great. Okay, women in construction, so, I was I was trying to think how to ask this, but construction has historically been a male dominated industry, but, but that’s, that’s changing, right, like, we’re slowly but surely, we, at one point we had half of our office at one point were women. And we lost two of them to, other two poachers that we trained up. And both of the women that we lost were A-players, and they’re doing awesome right now. And, you know as much as you hate to see someone that you’ve trained up, go, my, our thing has always been, like, you know leave on good terms. Yeah. You’re always welcome back, and if you think it’s a better fit for you and your family, you know go get it right. But when you when you started at your company, did you feel that you had to prove yourself differently?
Alice: You want me to go first, [laugh]. So that, that question for me, I think is, like, internal versus external. So I started, kind of, similar to Jessica. I worked under a controller and he hired me just cause he needed someone like part-time that he knows he can trust with numbers and things like that. So, so he hired me and my dad, our current president, did not know or support it at all because I was not thriving in the math department in college at the time. You have to ask him about that story. But, so I think internally I had to prove myself just because it wasn’t a fully supported decision and because I’m a family member and I got hired cause I’m a family member. Yeah. And I didn’t want that stigma. So I think for a while that was my goal was to prove myself internally. But everyone was awesome and receptive. And we had another woman in the office at the time and maybe even of painter in the field that was a woman. A lot less, you know than you would hope as a woman. But that was not an issue for me in our office being a woman but being a family member, yeah, myself. But externally, yeah, getting out and like starting to be more involved in the Conway and like The Builders Exchange in those groups. It was like, wow, we are definitely outnumbered. So you want to represent yourself and your business well, but also all women in construction, right? So, yeah I think externally I felt like I had to prove myself a little bit more as a woman in construction, but internally I wanted to prove like, yes, I am a Martin, but I also want to be here and earn it just like the next person.
Sean: Yeah. So probably the same thing for you, right? I didn’t even think about, yeah, they were from family.
Jessica: Yeah I feel like the stereotype is slowly changing a little bit. I mean I’ve always been very outnumbered in every meeting I’ve ever been to. That’s internally and externally, you just kind of get used to that, yeah, it doesn’t bother me anymore. But, you know there was always that stereotype like that, you know the, I, I absolutely hate, everybody in the office knows that I hate the word secretary, cause that’s always been, like, the, the stereotype. Like, you know I’m a note-taker, and so, like, oh, she’s just here to take notes. And, yeah, you know so we’re getting away from that a little bit, but it, it’s taken some time. I mean some of that coming up through the accounting department in hind-sight. If I had to do over again, I would have spent time in every department, and, you know spent time out in the field, and, yeah, you know had that field experience when I was much younger. If I were to do it over again, that would be the one thing I would go back and change. Do you, do you think this is for both of you: Do you have more laborers in the field who are women now than 5, 10 years ago? Our, our drivers, as far as Anderson Concrete, most of our employees are mixture drivers, truck drivers, and we have had very, very few female drivers over the years. I will say we’ve got a couple now and that’s more than we had had before. And, you know we’re, we’re trying to make sure that they’re not meeting resistance there. That’s inappropriate and that’s, you know internally and external, yeah, you know like we’re trying to make sure that their road is, you know the same as everybody else’s and they’re not being treated differently. So I mean like a little bit more, but it’s still very out numbered.
Alice: Same for us. We have a handful of painters that are women in the field and it’s probably been a consistent number for the last five years about the same. But in the office and more like supervisor roles, we have had an increase and that’s been wonderful to see.
Sean: Same with us. We’ve had two project managers who were amazing. Cheryl, who’s our estimator, who is one of the best, I mean she’s been around for a while, but she’s one of the best estimators there is out there. But, I mean there still is that stigma out there. Like when we had, you know project managers, you’ll have owners or owners reps who will, you know you know be disrespectful. And, you know I remember, you know one of our employees who left said something and I was like, I want to sit in on this phone call and listen. And we didn’t tell the guy that me and Matt were on that phone call. As soon as he started in on her, we were like, [oh my,] here we go, so “hey, we’re here too.” And his tone totally changes.
Jessica: Yeah. And I’ve taken me a long time to find my voice, especially in conference rooms and meetings like that. It’s, it’s taken a long time for me to find that voice, but, you know I still get interrupted a lot. Yeah, just talk right over me, like I’m not talking. And so, like, I’m very sensitive to that. Yeah, and that still happens. Yeah, and, you know and hopefully,
Sean: I mean you’re smart enough to know that that happens because those people aren’t confident in their roles, right? So they feel intimidated. So
Jessica: I will say though, that I have been very fortunate in the industry and then the concrete part of our industry specifically, I have been, since I was in my 20s, like always embraced, always supported, always encouraged. I’ve been very fortunate that I haven’t had a bad experience as a woman in construction. My mentors, male and female, have always been incredibly supportive. And so that’s been my experience. Yeah, that’s what I always try to like preach to, to women that are considering coming in the industry as I think it’s been an incredibly supportive industry. You said it earlier, it’s very relationship driven. And, you know that’s the reason why I stayed, you know like that. I think I said it a while ago, yeah, I, that wasn’t really my, my career path and my plan to be in construction or even to work for the family business. But when I started and got to know the people, and got to know the, just the community, I never left ‘cause it was fantastic.
Rachel: Yeah, I feel like one of my questions you guys was going to be, what would your what would you say to a woman who wanted to enter the industry? But I think that’s perfect. It’s, there are very supportive mentors here, and there’s a lot of education and people willing to bring you into the industry.
Sean: Yeah, it’s a tight knit community and everyone, I think that is the other thing about, you know we, we do compete against. There’s, you know we’re not competing issue directly, but we have people that we compete against, but everyone wants to see everyone else succeed. And I think that’s because, you know you touched on it earlier, it’s the nature of the business, like, it’s, it’s hard, right, and we want to see other people, you know we want to lift other people up and, and see them succeed as well. Alright, so, oh my gosh, where am I going to go from here? So we’re, we’re just about an hour into this thing, so, we’re going to go to future the industry real quick and then some rapid fire questions. We’ve, we’ve covered, we’ve talked about all the challenges in the industry and let’s talk opportunity. So, we, Rachel and I were at a Worthington City Council meeting the other day, and we heard, was it Matt McCollister, from One Columbus talk about the run that Columbus has had. He’s, he basically said Columbus has had an amazing run in the past 15 years. And I was sitting next to a to a developer friend, and I said, “does that sound like we’ve had a 15 year run and it’s about to come to an end?” [laughter] And he goes, “no, I don’t think that’s what he means at all,” and that wasn’t what he meant, and he went on to sort of expound, but, where do you see? Do you do you think Columbus is still primed for a lot of growth? And, and what markets or industries do you see, or what market segments do you see the biggest opportunity for growth in?
Alice: So I, yes, all in all, I think Columbus is still healthy for, for our industry. I think that we’re going to continue building, whether that’s, you know central Columbus and then expanding which we have already seen, you know begin. I think what would be a great opportunity is for more of the renovation side of things rather than demolish and rebuild, because I think we just we need to start thinking a little bit more about recycling what we can. Yeah. Is it going to be, you know more, more costly? Maybe because you’re going to have to get more specific on the redesign and the reconstruction. More creative? Yeah, yeah, but I think that that’s probably a good opportunity for our industry when it comes to construction and, and building is, you know Columbus is getting more and more populated and yes, we have room to build, but don’t destroy if you don’t have to. Yeah, I think that’s a good opportunity
Sean: We have a great client, I have to give a shout out to COhatch. And they do a lot of repurposing of old buildings. And we’re finishing a project in Hamilton, Ohio which is an old bank. And they do some new-builds too. But like they would rather, you know repurpose. They did it in Westerville. Yeah I mean they’re just… They do a great job of that. Yeah. So they’re just, I mean they, which is fun, like as a construction, like you, when you go into those old buildings, you’re like, I know, this is so cool.
Alice: Yeah, we see that a lot with churches because we do a lot of that restoration in churches and some of them are protected and you, you wouldn’t be able to touch them anyway. But it brings a lot of like joy and satisfaction being, you know local, being born and raised here, also some of the churches too. I think we did one and my dad was saying that his great grandma was baptized in that church. [That’s awesome.] And it’s like, what, like, just the history, yeah, some of these buildings is, is amazing.
Sean: Yeah, I’m with you, yeah, I love repurposing old buildings. [Yeah, yeah] so Jessica, this questions probably a little more, it’s different for you because you, you’re dealing with these big some of these mega projects, and so what do you do? You think, you know what’s your pulse on that? Do you think we’re going to continue to see that or time will tell?
Jessica: Right now, it looks like that, I mean that’s been, one of the biggest challenges, in the last year or two, is just the, some of these projects have, some of these projects have been taking such, you know shifts and change of direction, schedule changes. And so that’s been really challenging to see where the future of some of these projects are going. I, I still feel like they’re moving forward. It’s just a matter of like, how quickly and how it’s all going to play out. But yeah,
Sean: I think that’s been a change over the past year for sure is I feel like we’re still super busy for sure, but it was a breakneck speed prior to this. And I think there’s just I think part of it is with the economy. People don’t know, they, you hear all these different things and there is no way to really plan like what’s going to, are we going into recession? We’ve been talking about for five years, yeah, are we not? What’s our interest rates coming down? We think so, but we don’t know. And if there’s going to be a cut, how many cuts are there going to be? So do we jump in now? Do we hold off and wait? Do we wait for the next cut? So, I think all those factors are at play. And, it’s like, are we going to see what happened, you know like sort of after covid where the floodgates open and now suddenly we can’t keep up again? So it’ll be interesting if we had if we knew the answer to that question, we’d be rich, right?
Jessica: It still feels like we’re really fortunate to be in this market, to be in Columbus. Yeah, you know at what speed it takes off or keeps going is yet to be determined. But I still think, you know compared to other parts of Ohio, other parts of the country, I still feel like we’re in a really fortunate spot.
Sean: Yeah, they were they gave some numbers at that council, that Worthington yeah, that
Rachel: Worthington Together,
Sean: Yeah, so Worthington’s going through it. We’re developing a new comp plan. So they had a speaker series answering some questions in the number that he gave was staggering. The amount of people moving to Columbus now, compared to the rest of Ohio, and the projections for like 2050. So crazy. Alright, so I’ve kept you a minute over, so we’re going to do some rapid fire and reflection questions real quick. Favorite project you’ve ever completed?
Alice: They’re all so different. Off the top of my head, I would have to say…
Sean: This is a disclaimer, everybody in this room loves every single client, and we’re so thankful that we’re able to work with them all.
Alice: Thank you for that. The one that pops into my head, just cause I see it every single day is the Crew stack, because, oh, that’s awesome. Every day I see it and most, most of you probably do, but it’s huge, the story behind it is so cool. So that’s probably my favorite, just because I see it all the time.
Sean: How did you guys get up there to paint that was it lifts, was it rappelling, what did you do? We brought a lift in from Texas, okay, and it was huge, so how did you find it where you just like, “we’ve got to do an online search and find this lift” or like…
Alice: Oh yeah, our operations team just like nose to the earth, just figuring it out, finding the lift, like, they can I swear they can do anything, they’re so impressive. And they found this lift and they got it here. And it was it was an impressive job to see…
Sean: That thing is such an icon Columbus. Yeah, And just a plug “Go Crew.” I think on Sunday night, they lost the other night against Cincinnati, so they have to win on, I think it’s Sunday. But… Your favorite project.
Jessica: I have to narrow down to one. Yeah there’s a lot of stadiums that are cool, some hospitals that are cool. I’ll say, Vets Memorial. Oh yeah.
Rachel: I was just there for the, yeah, Columbus Metropolitan Club.
Sean: You’re just talking how awesome that place was.
Rachel: Yeah. And there’s like a Full Metal Jacket special exhibit going on right now.
Jessica: That place, it’s a very cool building. It was very cool concrete project. You know it won literal like concrete specific awards just cause it was so unique and so cool and just everything it represents also. But like it’s just a really iconic building.
Sean: It is super,
Rachel: even the view from just the front is amazing.
Sean: Yeah. It’s a great building. Rachel, what’s your favorite project?
Rachel: I have not thought about this at all I don’t want to eat up our time. Probably I love them, you know I’m like so into all of them, so it’s really hard to say. I really like COhatch Hamilton and COhatch Powell that are going in right now. Both of those are just because the historic building in Hamilton is so beautiful. I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I love all of our projects. And Powell is just such a cool, all the finishes those big wood beams…
Sean: So COhatch Powell is one of their new builds they have, it’s a mass timber frame building and It’s only the second one in Ohio. But yeah, it was just it’s a really cool building. And if you ever want to come see it, I’d love to take you through it. Alright. So last question, I guess and we’ll end it with this, what’s one lesson you tell your younger self starting out in construction? And I guess this question is we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about all the risk and the things that keep us up at night, cause I, I think about that all the time. But I also think about, is there anything what else would I rather be doing. And aside from professional golfer, which that’s not going to happen, I don’t think there’s anything else I’d rather be doing. Like, I love the people, I love the projects at the end of the day, I love the challenges. So, yeah…
Alice: Yeah, that’s an amazing point, and I, I definitely agree with that. For me, if I were to speak to my younger self, [laugh], I think one thing I would say is you’re exactly where you are supposed to be, and you’re going to be really happy.
Sean/Jessica: That’s a great answer.
Alice: Advice, I would say, you know ask questions, you know continue to ask questions and, and continue to get into groups. I do wish that I got into groups earlier, and I wish I would have spent my summer’s painting, because I did come up through accounting as well. And although that’s not my passion, I did learn a lot. But we are painters, and I wish that I came through a little bit more the operation side, yeah, but get into groups and get more mentors early, early on: men and women.
Sean: Yeah, for sure, yeah, great advice.
Jessica: My, my sarcastic answer was going to be learn how to play golf. I wish somebody would have told me that a long time ago. [Yeah, that’s a good one, yeah, great one.] So many people golf. The real answer, I guess. I think it took me too long to lead or learn to lead authentically to lead with my with my own strengths and my own skills. I think for a long time, I was trying to lead like other people, whether it’s, you know like family members that, that were leaders before me. I was trying to like do what they did and do things the way they did it, but we have two very different skill sets and leadership styles. And so it take it it has taken me a long time to realize that I need to lead authentically with my skill set. And, I’ll try to keep it short, but my skill set, when I did Strength Finder, my leadership team has done Strength Finder, and some of my top five skills seemed like too soft of skills to be a leader in the construction industry. Like empathy, harmony, yeah, things like that. I was like, oh, I don’t think that’s going to be successful in construction. And it took me a long time to realize that those skills are very important in construction and to like lean into them rather than try to like shy away from it and cover it up. And so it took me too long to figure that out.
Sean: And I think, you know you hit the nail on the head, construction pun there, but you people, if you’re not authentic, people can see right through that. And I feel like the sales piece, like, that I do is, you know if you’re lying to someone, they’re going to they’re going to call you out on it immediately. So be authentic, and then I also had a mentor who, when he talked about leadership, I had a lot of the same things and he was like, look, this doesn’t mean you’re a bad leader. Everyone’s going to tell you your, these are the qualities of leaders, but what makes a good leader is realizing where your blind spots are, what you’re good at, and being able to recognize that in other people and lead that way. So that’s a great point. Yeah, alright, Rachel, what would you tell your younger self?
Rachel: wow, I don’t know how to follow that, like right on the nose. My younger self wouldn’t have listened to anything, [laugh], that I had to say, [laugh], that’s the truth, but I guess for simply put, don’t sleep on the construction industry as a career path. Cause obviously, I’m midlife switching over into the industry, but it’s a great industry. I mean seriously consider it. It’s, it’s awesome to be in.
Sean: All right, well, that was awesome. So was it as bad as you thought it was going to be? Yeah, super fun yeah, super fun yeah. Alice, thank you so much. Jessica, thank you so much. Rachel, thank you so much. And that’s the construction collective signing off for episode three.
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