Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses Working for Diversity

Large firms have taken minority- and women-owned companies under their wings to bring more diversity to the industry

By Debra Wood

Minority and women-owned businesses are learning from larger firms how to grow and succeed in the construction industry through construction schools, mentoring programs and affiliations with local or regional associations or governments.

Graduates of the Turner School of Construction Management and the JE Dunn Construction Group of Kansas City, and Austin Industries of Dallas mentorship programs have watched their businesses blossom and the larger firms have developed a stable of reliable partners and subcontractors.

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“We have created some competitors [with the Turner School of Construction Management], and that’s good,” says Hilton Smith, senior vice president of community affairs for Turner Construction Co. in Cleveland. “We also have created business opportunities for the minority contractors to joint venture with us on large projects around the country. We’ve had firms grow to that end.”

Smith developed the Turner School of Construction Management in 1969 to teach minority and women business how to grow and succeed. Participants learn about planning, safety, accounting, estimating, financing, marketing, contract law and bonding during the 10-week course.

“Thirty-nine years ago, minority businesses could only do certain kinds of jobs, and they were not included in major construction projects,” Smith says. “We wanted to do something about that.”

At the time, Smith worked for the city of Cleveland. Then-Mayor Carl B. Stokes approached Turner about creating minority opportunities, and the school was born. Smith joined Turner, in 1971, to run the program, and has headed up the program as it grew to sites throughout the country. More than 15,000 minority and women business owners have graduated from the school.

Bob Hambright, Southeast Division President/CEO of Balfour Beatty Construction, accepts the Corporation of the Year award from the Ron Leeper of the United Minority Contractors of North Carolina.

“We become familiar with each other in class and do business with each other,” Smith says. “A lot of them will never grow to do business with Turner, but they can learn to do what they do well and become profitable. A lot don’t want to grow too large.”

“[The Turner school] turned my life around,” says Christopher Black, president and CEO of New England Construction Co. of Garden City Park, N.Y., who took the program about 17 years ago. “They gave me a full understanding about what it takes to take a trade and turn it into a business.”

New England has worked on many Turner projects, including installation of drywall, ceilings and door frames on the Time Warner-CNN Conference Center in New York and ceilings at the Islip Court House in Islip, N.Y. Black estimates 60% of his firm’s annual $40 million revenue comes from Turner projects.

“With this program, we’ve let billions of dollars over the years,” Smith says.

Turner sets a 20% minority or women participation goal on all jobs and let $1 billion in 2005 and again in 2006 to such firms.

“That is our way of showing we have conviction of making this program work, and it can work,” Smith says.

Other large companies have taken a slightly different approach to meet similar goals. JE Dunn Construction Group of Kansas City, Mo., and Austin Industries of Dallas have developed mentor-protégé programs.

“We have minority requirements we have to meet on certain public projects, and to meet those requirements we need a number of qualified subcontractors and vendors to bid the work and keep the competition at an optimum level,” says Greg Nook, JE Dunn’s executive vice president of marketing. “There were few subcontractors or vendors that fit the categories we needed. We wanted a vehicle to develop and nurture those businesses.” 

Therefore, JE Dunn began its mentor-protégé program three years ago after the company found it difficult to find qualified minority- and women-owned businesses to work with.

“They didn’t exist to this level,” says Marvin Carolina, director of diversity for JE Dunn. “Financing, expertise, bonding ability and workforce weren’t there.”

Twelve minority or women business owners graduated in the first class and 13 are currently participating in the two-year program. Classes meet every other month and cover a wide range of topics, starting off with professionalism, communication skills, problem solving, leadership and motivation.

“Topics deal with the owner because if you don’t have a good owner, it’s difficult for a small business to continue,” Carolina says.

JE Dunn then adds courses about the business structure, such as policies and procedures, accounting and estimating. The second year, the focus turns to presentation skills and helping participants overcome individual obstacles. JE Dunn pairs the minority firm with a large, successful mentor company in a different trade, typically also minority or women owned, but not necessarily.

Carolina says that even though the program is relatively new, it has already helped his firm find subcontractors to work with, and it uses those subs on all jobs, not just those with minority-participation goals.

Several large firms tackle diversity at the local level by participating in state- or association-sponsored activities.

Calvin Stevens, minority business development manager for Balfour Beatty.

In North Carolina, Balfour Beatty Construction in Raleigh and Charlotte participates in the state’s Office for Historically Underutilized Businesses mentor-protégé program. Calvin Stevens, minority business development manager for Balfour Beatty, says that Bullock Building Co. of Durham, N.C., increased its business with the larger firm from $70,000 four years ago to $3 million in 2007.

“We brought them in and showed them the processes and procedures, and [Mark Bullock] implemented them on a smaller level,” Stevens says.

Bovis Lend Lease in New York has established an enrichment program to help minority- and women-owned businesses reach the next level, says Dorne Edwards, senior manager of the Bovis supply diversity program. During a quarterly forum, minority and women businesses are invited to present information about their firms to the Bovis senior management team. The company also sponsors a contractor fair, and its employees taught a seven-week training course for the New York Association of Minority Contractors.

‘Family’ Friendly Cuban immigrants’ OC contracting firm places employees first By David Silva To say that Joe Troya and Tony Elias-Calles have close ties to one another would be like saying that Cuba -- the two men’s native country -- has close ties to the Caribbean. The two are inseparable. Joe Troya and Tony Elias-Calles. Troya and Elias-Calles were childhood friends in their hometown of Guantanamo. Both emigrated with their families to the U.S. by way of Spain, Elias-Calles arriving here in 1966, Troya in 1974. Though they lost contact with one another for a time, they reconnected in the late 1980s and soon were tied together by more than friendship -- Troya married Elias-Calles’ sister, Alis. In 1993, Troya joined his brother-in-law’s budding construction company, Consolidated Contracting Services Inc. in San Clemente, as partner. Together, they grew the company from a 15-employee operation to a successful, full-service general contracting firm employing more than 60 people. Elias-Calles says Consolidated Contracting Services did more than $40 million in business in 2007, including the recent completion of the $10 million San Diego Gas & Electric Co. operations building in downtown San Diego, and specializes in building churches, firehouses and community health centers. “Our lives are so intertwined,” says Troya, 48, who graduated from Long Beach State with a degree in construction management, as well as an AA degree in architecture from Rancho Santiago College. “We have kids in the same age group, we surf and dirt-bike together, we go camping together. We get along as a family and as business partners. More important, we respect and complement each other. He’s got expertise I don’t have and I have expertise that he doesn’t.” Elias-Calles also attended Long Beach State and graduated with a degree in construction management, along with an AA degree in psychology from Orange Coast College. When they started the business, “we were doing a lot of things back then based on our individual personal values,” says Elias-Calles, 50. “Then we met Ron Dennis, a purchasing manager from Hewlett-Packard, who said, ‘You guys are doing a lot of things, but you have no way of communicating what you’re doing -- you can’t promote yourselves.’ He hooked us up with some gentlemen to start doing what he called total quality management. Recognizing the importance of this style, we set aside two weeks with our 15 employees to hammer out a set of values for our company.” Over those two weeks “grueling weeks,” as Troya recalls -- the company staked out a set of core values that would serve as its guiding principles. Among them: that every employee, from the lowest-paid to the partners themselves, feel free to communicate their ideas without fear of repercussion or consequences; for the firm to value integrity above all else; that the employee’s family commitments be sacrosanct; and that every employee provide consistent high-quality work. Troya describes the resultant company philosophy as an “inverted pyramid management organization.” “Most companies have a pyramid management structure, with the laborers at the jobsite on the bottom and the owners at the top,” he says. “We took that pyramid and turned it upside down. At the bottom are Joe and Tony. We’re supporting the senior managers. They support the managers, and so on. “At the top are the laborers, the first people a client will see when he walks onto a job site. We wanted an organization that empowers the laborers so that if they see a problem on the job, they don't have to wait to go to their boss to correct it. If they see a safety violation, they should be praised for finding the violation and encouraged to correct it themselves. “That way, they’re able to say, ‘This is my company, and if you wear my company’s T-shirt, you don’t smoke on the job, you don’t blast the radio, you don’t wear sandals.’” Troya says the result of this philosophy is a cohesive unit in which each member sees himself or herself not only as a valued member of the organization, but as family. And he adds that he and Elias-Calles feel the same about the people who work for them. “Not only do our employees depend on us, but when you add in their families, that’s a lot of people who depend on us,” Troya says. “We just had our biggest year in 2007, but I think it’s pretty obvious to everyone that the construction business is hurting. You worry. You worry about the future. You worry about the families committed to this company. You want to keep everyone busy through the tough times, because letting people go would be like letting go of family.”

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