The construction industry is evolving in terms of women-led teams. Listen in for advice to women entering the industry. Jody Staruck worked on the YWCA Central Massachusetts $24 million renovation project. She talks about the requirements, scope and stakeholders of this project and the unique story behind their petition to win the bid for this renovation.
Table of Contents
01:41 … Meet Jody04:04 … The First Female Executive06:23 … Consigli Construction Growth08:38 … Maintaining a Strong Company Culture11:10 … YWCA Central Massachusetts Renovation Project13:44 … The YWCA Services to the Community14:50 … A Unique Bid Petition17:16 … Approach to Obstacles21:53 … The Unique Perspective of a Woman-Led Team24:34 … Overcoming Communication Barriers27:55 … Is the Construction Industry Changing?30:52 … Advice for Younger Women32:29 … Creating More Career Advancement Opportunities34:38 … Get in Touch with Jody35:36 … Closing
JODY STARUK: ...what I tell my younger teammates, male or female, is make a decision because at least then you’re in control. Otherwise, the decision is being made for you. And if you make the wrong decision, make another one to fix it. So there’s always another option to fix it.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and here in the studio with me is Bill Yates. We want to take a moment to say thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website and on social media. We love hearing from you, and I always appreciate your positive ratings on Apple Podcasts or whichever podcast listening app you use.
One other thing is we know you’re looking for opportunities to acquire PDUs, your Professional Development Units, towards recertifications. You can still claim PDUs for all of our podcast episodes. Take a listen at the end of the show for information on how to claim your PDUs.
When you think of an industry dominated by men, construction might be one of those that comes to mind. Not so, Bill. Women make up apparently only 10 to 11% of the construction industry’s workforce.
BILL YATES: Well, we are fortunate to have a conversation today with a real trailblazer in the industry. In 2017, our guest, Jody Staruk, received Consigli’s highest honor, Builder of the Year, out of 300 eligible employees. Now, Consigli is located –it’s in the northeast. It’s mostly in the Boston area. So Jody is the first woman recipient. She’s also the first female project executive in Consigli’s 116-year history.
Meet Jody
WENDY GROUNDS: Hi, Jody. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you for joining us today.
JODY STARUK: Thank you so much for having me.
WENDY GROUNDS: We want to find out a lot of things from you today. But I first want to know how did you get into the construction business? It is rather an unusual choice. Just tell us your background story a little bit.
JODY STARUK: Sure. Well, it was actually by sheer luck. I grew up in Maine. I never saw a building be built in my entire life. My mom was a math teacher. So if I got less than an A in math I was grounded, which didn’t seem very fair because the worse I ever got was a B, but that’s still how it works. So I was good at math by necessity, and I also enjoyed, you know, the sciences and stuff like that.
And the only thing that led me down the road of engineering was a drafting class I took my senior year in high school. And in Maine they have the University of Maine system, and UMaine Orono has a really good engineering school. So I was going to go there because everybody goes to one of the UMaine schools. And I applied to Worcester Polytechnic Institute just to say I applied to two schools. I got into both, and I said, “All right, great, I’m going to go to UMaine.” And my parents said, “Great, you’re going to live at home.” And I said, “WPI it is.”
BILL YATES: So it made the decision.
JODY STARUK: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, years later, once I had set up college accounts for my girls, you know, come to find out they really Miyagi’d me into that decision because it was cheaper for them to send me to WPI, which was a predominantly male school, because of the money I was receiving from them, than it was UMaine. So they kind of reverse psychology’d me. Then when I got there I was studying civil engineering, and I was going to do structural engineering.
But I had one advisor who said, “Have you ever thought about construction project management?” I said, “No, I have no idea what that is.” And he said, “I think you’d be really good at it because you’re really good with people.” And I just kind of took that very naively and said okay. And I ended up staying at WPI for my master’s degree – they do a five-year BS/MS program – and worked with him on my thesis. Got introduced to Consigli at a job fair and then ended up working with them right out of the gate. And almost 18 years later, here I am. But I walked in day one not knowing anything. And actually lucked out quite a bit, that, one, it’s something I really enjoy; and, two, come to find out I’m relatively good at it.
The First Female Executive
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s amazing. And what has kind of been the reality for you as a woman? I think you were the first woman project manager that they’d had?
JODY STARUK: So I wasn’t the first project manager. There were two, I think, ahead of me by the time I was promoted to project manager back in, I don’t know, maybe ‘06? But I was the first female executive. And it was interesting because it took Anthony Consigli about a year to get me to say yes because, when he approached me with it, my girls had just turned two and four. So I was in the heat of it. I was busy. My husband’s a firefighter. So I’m working around a rotating schedule.
And frankly, what I told him, I said, “Anthony,” I said, “I come to work to feel confident and in control.” I said, “And I don’t really know anything about the executive position and what they do.” Because I never really interacted with them because I just ran my projects. And if I needed them, I’d call maybe, you know, a half a dozen times a year. Other than that, I was on my own island and said, “Leave me alone. I’m good.”
The three reasons he gave me at the time were, “One, you’ve been here a really long time. I think you deserve this position,” he said. “Two, I think you’d have a greater impact on the company because you’d get to interact with more people and more teams than you do on your individual jobsites.” And he said, “Three is actually rather selfish.” But to me it was my favorite one. He said, “I really need the women of this organization to know that they have a place to go.” I really, really loved that.
It still took them a year after that because I said, “Well, I need to understand a little bit more about what they do and what my role would be.” And, you know, he said, “Well, if you don’t like it, you can always go back to running projects.” And I said, “Anthony, you’re asking me to be the first female executive of the company, which means it can’t fail,” I said, “because whether it’s my decision or not, it will never be viewed that way, and I don’t want to send that message to the younger women in the company.”
So it took about a year for me to get onboard and be comfortable enough with it that I knew it was the right thing. And now it’s been about three and a half years, and I feel like I’m kind of gaining my stride and understanding it and doing some really good and fun things with my teams and the company. And I’m really enjoying myself.
Consigli Construction Growth
BILL YATES: You’ve had a phenomenal career there. Thank you for sharing some of that background, too. And I’m sure for some listeners just that sense of, okay, I’m kind of going first into this position or at this level. I’m sure there are many that can relate to that, that sense of, okay, this is more than just a job. I’ve got some responsibilities kind of beyond me. And I don’t want to let myself down. I don’t want to let the company down or those that work with me. So that’s powerful. Tell us more about Consigli Construction because when I was looking on the website and the growth, there’s been some pretty phenomenal growth. And the cool thing is you’ve been there throughout it. So tell us some about that.
JODY STARUK: Yeah. So when I started, it was probably maybe a little over a hundred people, including our field staff. We were in one small building in downtown Milford, and we were probably a 40 to $50 million company annually. But now we have over 1,200 employees across nine regional offices that span between Washington, D.C. all the way out to Portland, Maine. So it’s been, you know, interesting. I’ve seen the onboarding of all these different offices and the different projects and niches that each of these regions bring. So it’s gone from winning a project that was like $20 million and everybody going down the street to celebrate because we were all there and a part of it, to some of the projects we’re running now are bigger than the company was, exponentially bigger than the company was when I started.
But we’ve stayed true to what we hold important, being genuine builders, having that self-perform aspect. We’ve kept increasing our self-perform labor force, you know, so we’re still doing the masonry. We have masons, carpenters, and laborers. So that has never changed. We still do the same type of work, lot of academic work, healthcare, life sciences and the restoration which has never changed. But we’ve been able to expand that a little more, especially as we’ve gone into the cities like Boston with the multifamily residential or some of the corporate developer work. But yeah,
