Last night’s 32nd anniversary of the Burnham Award Dinner was a massive success! The award honors Chicago leaders for making the city a better place to work and live – and I am humbled to be among them. I made Chicago my home back in 2010 and moved Clayco’s Headquarters to this great city because of its amazing business community, which the Chicago Chamber of Commerce helps support.
Missouri has played a fundamental role in Clayco’s history and my own. I grew up and started Clayco in the St. Louis region, and it is a heartfelt focus of mine to help the area regain its past glory. As the next step toward this mission, I am thrilled to announce the relocation and expansion of our St. Louis offices and operations center! Our St. Louis regional offices will come together in Berkeley, Missouri, in a newly recycled and renovated Clayco hub. What’s truly serendipitous about this is that Clayco designed and built the office for another company 11 years ago – and soon, it will be our new home. The 230,000-square-foot facility in NorthPark Development will accommodate over 1,000 team members committed to engaging the local community with their time and hands.
Nothing slows our Clayco team down! We are celebrating several office openings across the country, demonstrating the success of the continued growth of our construction family. In the Southwest, we commemorated the grand opening of our regional headquarters in Phoenix! The 48,000-square-foot office is home to 400+ employees and our partner companies, LJC, CRG, Concrete Strategies, and Ventana, that support thousands of skilled workers throughout Arizona.
Clayco is helping build a healthier campus at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville! Our team recently celebrated the groundbreaking of SIUE’s new health sciences complex, where we are working with Lamar Johnson Collaborative, along with PoetkkerJV and Christner Inc., to develop the facility.
We’re breaking ground and helping pave the way toward higher education! Construction began on September 8th on the Center for Emerging Technologies and the Financial Services & Enrollment Center at St. Louis Community College’s Meramec campus. This groundbreaking is part of six new buildings planned across STLCC’s four main campuses as part of a facilities update.
Electric vehicle manufacturing is a pivotal step toward pioneering newer, greener frontiers - and Clayco and ENTEK are at the forefront! ENTEK, the only US-owned and operated manufacturer of wet-process lithium-ion battery separators, has made its single largest investment to date. On September 6th, the company broke ground on a $1.5 billion separator plant in Terre Haute, Indiana, and chose our Clayco team to design and build it.
My first job was stamping cans at a little grocery market in exchange for candy at about 10 years old. The concept of earning was an early instinct of mine.
During my teen years, I had a car wash on my home driveway, after which I started doing small painting and odd jobs at neighbors’ homes for extra money, but mainly to avoid mowing my own yard by paying the kid down the street to do it. I could make more money doing the other jobs, which allowed me to pay him very little to do something I didn’t want to do that was much more time-consuming. Looking back, that was an entrepreneurial experience.