Thanks to founder and CEO Jim McShane, McShane Construction has expanded to become a three-pronged business empire.<\/strong><\/em> Jim McShane\u2019s role within his family\u2019s company has changed considerably since he founded the firm in 1984. The McShane family business started out as McShane Construction in 1984, looking to enter the industrial construction sector in the Midwest. However, circumstances and a desire to diversify would push the small, family-owned firm to grow into a much larger entity with an ever expanding presence in the construction and real estate businesses.<\/p>\n Today, The McShane Companies comprise three separate entities\u2014McShane Construction Company and Conor Commercial Real Estate, both based in Rosemont, Illinois; and Cadence McShane Construction, headquartered in Dallas.<\/p>\n The firm is recognized as a national real estate developer and construction services provider.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a consulting firm spend time with us in the late \u201880s, and they basically said, \u2018If you don\u2019t have more arrows in your quiver, you\u2019re probably going to go out of business,\u2019\u201d McShane told CEO Magazine on the incentives for the company\u2019s expansion and diversification. \u201cThey said, \u2018You will not survive unless you are a marketing-driven company.\u2019 So in 1990, we began to diversity geographically and through the creation of two additional companies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe went to Dallas during the recession of \u201989-\u201890, and a tremendous amount of real estate was available and the banks were in trouble. To a great extent, it was this recession that motivated us to expand geographically, which resulted in offices in nine cities across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, McShane Construction and its affiliates operate as a leading national industrial, commercial, and multi-family developer and builder. Yet Jim McShane insists they aim to be more than merely a real estate developer and general contractor. The firm sticks hard to the goal of turning its clients\u2019 visions into realities, whether it\u2019s through increased employee productivity, improved patient and caregiver welfare, or a greater sense of community.<\/p>\n McShane describes the business philosophy behind all three McShane companies as \u201crelentless service,\u201d to the degree that he believes the quality of service offered by any player in the construction industry can make or break a firm. In this sense, McShane claims he learned a great deal from studying GE\u2019s legendary former CEO, Jack Welch, whose tenure during the 1980s and \u201890s saw the company\u2019s value rise by 4,000%.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of relentless service is something that all construction companies need to look at,\u201d McShane elaborated. \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to just think of a building and how we\u2019re going to make a profit instead of trying to put ourselves in our client\u2019s shoes and understand their needs and wants. For example, when we build for a company like Apple, we need to understand how they operate, how they want to be treated, and how they want to make sure we\u2019re taking care of their needs.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of that is really a sit-down process, working through it with the client. Those early meetings have a lot to do with how successful a project will be. If we\u2019re communicating properly from the very beginning, schedule delays and budget problems generally don\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div> McShane described all three McShane companies as market-driven firms in the sense that they carry out substantial research on the coming trends in the real estate and construction industries, both of which are changing rapidly and can be difficult to predict. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re pushing hard into market sectors that we see growth in which, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be some form of housing,\u201d McShane explained. \u201cIt may be student housing. It may be affordable housing. But it\u2019s certainly going to be senior housing, and senior housing can have quite a few different components to it\u2014everything from skilled care to intermediate care to independent living.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe see senior housing as probably the biggest growth sector we\u2019re looking at right now, but we\u2019re also looking at continuing industrial growth and market rate housing,\u201d he elaborated. \u201cThese are components that we weren\u2019t in ten years ago, but we looked far enough ahead to see that those areas were going to grow and then we hired people who had the expertise needed to build these buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the short term, we are working hard at training young people. There was such an exodus during the Great Recession that we lost a lot of people in our industry. Now, we\u2019re hiring millennials and they want to advance their careers, so we need to train, develop, and provide career growth. One of the things we look for at McShane is continuity and whether we have people right behind the top leaders who understand and believe in the mission and, therefore, can carry it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n In the long term, McShane also sees the companies continuing to grow geographically, a strategy guided by both industrial trends and homeowner demographics. \u201cWe watch places like Texas where there\u2019s tremendous demographic growth,\u201d he highlighted. \u201cPeople are moving to Texas every day. When people move to an area, they need supermarkets, they need churches, they need roads, they need so many different things.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMeanwhile, in Chicago, where we\u2019re based, people continue to need services,\u201d McShane insisted. \u201cYou see companies like UPS, FedEx, and certainly Amazon moving in. They\u2019ve already built their distribution warehouses on the perimeter, and now what they\u2019re looking for is the last mile. We need to find an area that\u2019s re-developable and then accumulate three or four properties there.\u201d<\/p>\n McShane stressed the importance of strategic relationships in the construction industry, particularly as technology reshapes the sector and clients seek to hire and source products and components locally to help the economy.<\/p>\n \u201cOn any given project, we\u2019ll have between 40 and 50 subcontractors, and we evaluate them on the basis of their skillset,\u201d he explained. \u201cWe regularly bring subcontractors into our office, and they talk to us about what they see as far as new technologies and how we can adapt them to our needs.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, we\u2019re building a large facility in northern Minnesota,\u201d McShane outlined by way of example. \u201cWe need suppliers from that area because people want to hire local, but not everyone has the necessary expertise. For example, there aren\u2019t that many precast concrete suppliers in the area, so it\u2019s important to talk to the suppliers we do have on a daily basis to see what we can do differently to help them be more efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n McShane went back to the philosophy of relentless service as the key to gaining customer confidence and being ready for any eventuality in the unpredictable industry that his companies serve. \u201cThere are always issues in the construction business: it hails, it snows,\u201d he emphasized. \u201cSomething happens. It\u2019s how we react when these issues arise that\u2019s important, though. That\u2019s an attitude that we try to train our people to have. We\u2019re going to have problems, and it\u2019s how you deal with those problems that\u2019s going to set you apart from everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div> Thanks to founder and CEO Jim McShane, McShane Construction has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":23125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1337],"tags":[2729,2730,99,98,1385,2728,2727,2725,2726,2731],"class_list":["post-23123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-primezone","tag-building-from-the-bottom-up","tag-business-empire","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-north-america","tag-ceo-northam","tag-industrial-construction-secto","tag-jim-mcshane","tag-mcshane","tag-mcshane-construction","tag-real-estate-businesses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23123"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23137,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123\/revisions\/23137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/p>\nRELENTLESS SERVICE <\/b><\/h1>\n
LOOKING AHEAD <\/b><\/h1>\n
BROADENING HORIZONS <\/b><\/h1>\n
LONG-LASTING RELATIONSHIPS <\/b><\/h1>\n