Gregory Janey, President & CEO, Janey Construction Management
Gregory Janey, president and CEO of Janey Construction Management, sat down with Invest: to discuss his long-term priorities and strategies surrounding supporting young professionals, highlights from the past 12 months and noticeable trends in Greater Boston’s construction market.
What were Janey Construction Management’s greatest achievements in the past 12 months?
We have recently started construction on one of our largest projects to date. which includes the development of a new luxury condominium market in the western part of the city.With our other projects coming out of backlog after the pandemic, and our most recently awarded project our company has expanded by 20% over the last 12 months.
What does demand for your services in the Greater Boston region look like today, and how are you addressing it?
The demand for the built environment has evolved, as it always does. It has shifted from being very high demand in commercial, pencil tower, box office use to one of life sciences. Now, we are seeing another shift toward housing. People are trying to figure out an adaptive reuse model for transforming facilities. The industry has moved from this mixed-use and generally commercial box to more residential. Part of that is publicly demanded by our leaders for affordable housing, and the other part is economic demand by users, whether it is a luxury product or not. The challenge is in the middle ground for the workforce. There needs to be a bridge in financing that model.
What is the significance of your partnership with Turner Construction to transform the Seaport World Trade Center?
We have a partnership with Turner Construction on multiple projects, one of which is specifically on the World Trade Center. We also have very large and similar projects with them on Harvard University’s campus. The Seaport has completely transformed Boston in this particular region. It is trying to identify itself as a separate city. The World Trade Center is the hub of the Seaport for me, as it sits in the middle of it all. The name itself is iconic. It is the Seaport’s nucleus. From a transformation standpoint, the awakening of that particular center is going to cause a lot of impact for adjacencies. Economically, the client Fidelity is a giant in investment and finance. Being the anchor tenant in that building really underscores the presence of the World Trade Center and who the World Trade Center is.
Economically and socially speaking, we are the first Black-owned contractor to construct a high rise and are managing the largest project in the World Trade Center. When working in an area with underserved onlookers or in an underserved community, seeing an example like this creates inspiration. We are intentional about being a beacon of success for people who see those setting an example. This fosters collaborations between the public and private sectors to see what we can do together.
How have economic challenges impacted your organization?
Finance is everything. I am not a financial expert, but what I will say is the cost of money affects the tangible world as we know it. If rates go up, access to capital goes down. When access to capital goes down, development has a hold on it. When development is held back, people do not get jobs, and I could go on and on. There is a trickle effect when the cost of money increases. It further divides people who really need it. People who already have a large amount of cash flow or reserves are impacted less than those who have a greater need for funding. The gap widens as a result.
We have created a model with the intent of becoming more recession-proof and flexible. When the cost of money goes up, maybe we do more consulting with our clients on what to do and what not to do. When the cost of money goes down, we move back to building. Economic challenges definitely have an impact on our market, and flexibility and creativity are big parts of the answer to this problem.
What are your top priorities for the next two to three years?
My top priorities for the next two to three years include working on succession planning. It’s about restructuring my firm so my young leaders can be prepared to succeed my leadership as we know it. I am not going anywhere, but just as an example, if I decided to be more lateral in my leadership, then naming a cohort of people to the C-suite, that is something that I have to begin restructuring for now. That is No. 1. The priority is making sure we are keeping our eyes on these young professionals and not letting go.
Over the next three to five years, being more predictable about what we can control in our work will be another priority. Data analytics are currently being managed for each project to ensure probability and predictability are optimized. We will then be able to identify what projects we should be taking at certain times, why that is, and what our strong areas of expertise are.
