Les Hiscoe of Shawmut Design and Construction: 5 Questions

Shawmut Design and Construction is on a mission to grow to $5 billion in revenue, and it’s about halfway there.

Shawmut, a national construction management firm, has worked on major projects in New York City, including the amenity space and restaurant concept at Midtown’s 425 Park Avenue, as well as renovations to Major League Baseball ballpark Citi Field.

Over the last three years, the Boston-based firm has grown its annual revenue from about $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion, added new leadership roles, and expanded into new territories in an effort to reach that $5 billion revenue goal. 

Commercial Observer caught up with Shawmut CEO Les Hiscoe earlier this month to discuss how the company has been growing and working toward its objective. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: What is the mission of Shawmut Design and Construction?

Les Hiscoe: We work all over the country. We started in Boston many years ago, but I live and run the company from New York. We have a huge presence in New York. We’ve seen quite a bit of growth in the last few years, and that’s the result of a strategy change in the last five or so years to shift to much, much larger and more complex projects. 

Our specialties are education, commercial development, hotels, life sciences, health care and  retail. We try to have each of the sectors in all of our geographies. We’re a 100 percent employee-owned company, and we have been since 2005. It’s a people-first culture of care. We care more about our people, care more about our clients, care more about the buildings that we work to preserve, and care more about our communities.

What was the catalyst to the strategy change at Shawmut?

A lot of our early years as a company, we were a small to midsize projects company that worked all over the country. Back in 2017 and 2018, we were getting closer to that $1 billion revenue mark. And with that many projects in that many locations, it was a hard-to-sustain business model. So in the Northeast, we were starting to do larger projects. And so there was really a fundamental shift to say, “We need these kinds of large project anchors to anchor a region.” We needed these large projects. 

We were traveling into cities and doing work for clients that were more traveling clients, and to really anchor ourselves in a community and be the educational builder, be the sports facility builder, be the museum builder, be the library builder, or whatever, you have to be more and more local. So we really had to kind of focus on this local strategy, be that local New York builder who can do those large projects on all of those institutional sectors.

The strategy was to say, “Let’s have all these big anchors in all of our regions, and then let’s layer in all the stuff that we’ve historically served our clients on and have this nice mix of work.” And so it’s really a diversification of work strategy.

As CEO of an employee-owned company, my long-term responsibility is to make sure that I’ve created the most stable and successful company I can, because all of the families that work for our company’s retirement savings are tied up in their ownership of this company, and so I have to make sure we’re really stable, really well diversified, and have a more future-looking backlog.

Can you give us some details about some of the projects Shawmut has worked on?

We’re doing the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. We just finished the Columbia law library. We’ve got some hotel work going on here. We recently finished the renovation of the Peninsula Hotel. We did a great ground-up building at St. John’s University in Queens for a new health center. It’s a good mix of work here in the city that we’re really excited about.

One of our upcoming projects is a new Brooklyn Public Library in Canarsie, and it’s one of the first mass timber buildings to be done on a public space in New York. We’re just finishing a million-square-foot mass timber project — the largest mass timber project in the country — at Walmart‘s corporate campus in Bentonville, Ark. It’s a brand-new, state-of-the-art, beautiful campus. 

We were one of the first to do a mass timber project in Downtown Los Angeles — 843 North Spring Street. We’re doing a bunch of mass timer projects up in New England, including the American Repertory Theater. I’m super excited about becoming a leader in the country in mass timber.

What is it about mass timber that makes it an exciting building material?

Mass timber is a sustainable material, it’s a beautiful material, and we’ve done buildings in mass timber in two ways. A fully mass timber building would have columns, beams and the deck, which is usually a cross-laminated timber. So the entire thing is wood. It is just simply beautiful. We’ve also done a lot of hybrid mass timber builds, a steel structure with the cross-laminated timber decking. So when you look up at the ceiling of each space, instead of seeing drywall or an unfinished space with steel beams and pipes and things, you see this beautiful, finished wood that is structural.

Clients love the beauty and the sustainability of it. For us, it takes a little more precision than erecting steel. When you are installing it, there is a real sequence of events that calls for being more precise than when you erect steel. 

I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve done so much of it across the country. 

Shawmut recently hired Kathleen Abbott as the company’s first chief revenue officer and Joel Nickel as head of mission critical. Can you tell us about these hires and why Abbott and Nickel were the ones to take on these roles? 

As part of that strategic shift, one of the items on the original strategic plan was we had to reinvent our client and business intake system in total. Going from a small to midsize project company to a large project company, there were extremely different business development mentalities. 

Part of the new strategy is asking, “What projects do I need to target five years out?” And then developing the skill and capability to be able to do those projects five years from now, and give myself some time to do that, and ”What do I also have to do to position ourselves to be able to successfully win those projects?” So bringing Kathleen in was 100 percent about changing the firm’s way of taking business in and winning projects and clients, fundamentally to that longer-range thinking. 

Kathleen comes from 23 years at Arcadis, where she was a global business development executive, and she has that far-out look that we needed. She’s used to pre-positioning on infrastructure work many years out, creating strategies that really position us in sectors that we want to get into much further down the road.

Joel is our head of mission critical, which is really going to primarily, in the beginning, focus on data centers. But we also think the skills that we’ll develop in this business unit will really lend themselves to more manufacturing-type businesses, some of the onshoring of chip manufacturing, and different tough tech and things like that. We’re calling it mission critical, and Joel really has a big resume of data center building, of data center business, and all the specialties that come with that. 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.