Most weekends, you’ll find Patricia and David Giambrone in the kitchen, perfecting their pasta sauce recipe. Never mind that they’ve spent all week working together or the only thing they really don’t do together is golf (mostly because, with five kids, Pat hasn’t had time to get her game up to par).
Togetherness is what works, and it’s a collaboration that began in the early 1980s when Dave was running Giambrone Masonry. They first met when Dave bought a truck for his company from the dealership where Pat worked. Then, he leased a car. Then, says Pat, “we leased each other for life.”
She soon began helping Dave with the masonry company’s accounting and paperwork, and when he could afford to hire her, she came on board full time. It was Pat and Dave, running the company together.
By the late ’90s, business was good, but there was one major annoyance: As subcontractors, the Giambrones were typically the last to get paid, after the owners, the construction managers, the architects and the general contractors.
Life Lessons
Patricia Giambrone, co-owner of Giambrone Construction
» E-mail serves a purpose, but there’s nothing like actually talking to a person.
» Dave still opens the mail to this day. That’s how to keep the pulse of the
company.
» You have to take the extra step. You have to always show somebody that you care about your job and where you’re
going.
» I would feel awful if I went out of business and I put all these people that I employed all these years out of work. It would kill me. So I work harder and smarter so that my employees are happy and that they all have a job.
» You can’t spread yourself too thin. You need your family. You need to spend time with your kids. |
“I said [to Dave], ‘Honey, I’m tired of waiting for our money. Can we open a general construction company?’ ” Pat recalls.
Dave thought about it, remembered some news he’d heard about the Cleveland school district getting ready to build some new schools and told her to go for it.
So she did. She chose purple as the company color to differentiate herself from the blue of the masonry company and took Giambrone Construction operational in 1999 with two building projects: Medina Supply and the Beachwood fire station.
“I was thinking of our daughters,” Pat explains of her decision to launch a female-headed construction firm. “We made it a female enterprise for them, purposefully, to set a good example.”
In the decade since, the Giambrones have added Universal Scaffolding and Giambrone Distributors to their family of companies. And
Giambrone Construction is an $18.5 million operation that’s almost doubled in size since 2008. Their success, says Pat, comes from sticking to the basics — and sticking with family.
“We pay our [subcontractors] like we wanted to be paid,” she says. “The subcontractors are what we count on to get the correct numbers to be able to go in and be a low bidder for the job.”
And though the construction industry has taken a serious hit in the past couple years, there are still jobs out there. The Giambrones have continued to break ground on schools and other public buildings throughout Northeast Ohio.
There’s no sign at their headquarters. It’s not really necessary, Pat says. “We just figured that everybody knows who we are by the quality of our work,” she explains. “And that’s how we’ve grown the business.”
Other companies have tried to emulate the Giambrone model, but, Pat says, they forget the building blocks in their rush.
“They got to be like us very quickly,” she notes, “but their demise was very quick also.”
The Giambrones grow their companies carefully, slowly, sticking to what they know. Dave’s father and grandfather were bricklayers, so his heart lies in the masonry company he opened in 1977. Pat started out as an accountant, and today she’s the office end of operations. They’ve stuck to their own basics, and that includes, of course, the togetherness factor, which extends to their company culture.
“I’ve got chicken and dumplings that I made for dinner last night that I brought for everyone today,” Pat says. “When we kick off a job, we like to see if the construction manager, the owner, the architect, would like to come in to a meet-and-greet. No business. I want to know who you are; I want to see your face; I want you to see my face. I think that’s how you start off a job good.”