Enzo Scalora
CEO, Scalora Consulting Group
Age: 45
Industry experience: 24 years
Scalora Consulting Group provides a wide range of owner’s project management services on construction sites. Since launching in late winter, the firm has attracted 20 clients involved with 40 different projects in sectors ranging from higher ed to life science. Currently it’s overseeing notable projects including construction of Analog Devices’ 197,000-square-foot new global headquarters in Wilmington and Waterstone Properties’ 2 million-square-foot Rock Row development in Westbrook, Maine. Enzo Scalora founded the Ashland company after more than two decades in the construction and project management sectors. The company is seeking certification as a B Corp., a designation that assesses social impacts based upon how it affects employees and customers, the community and environment.
Q: What was the business plan when you launched the new firm early this year?
A: I had started another owner’s representative company about 15 years ago with partners, and decided to launch this new venture. I decided my vision was to build a company more related to having a purpose and not just profits. There is a greater need for companies to function beyond profit. Profit is important, but you’ve got to do something more. We decided to take a more purposeful approach to business and transferred our assets and staff. We had 20 clients transfer when we opened the door, and have added seven new clients since we launched in February.
A lot of clients are looking for support, and there is a lot of pent-up demand created by the COVID environment. Most of it has just been pent-up workloads that had been paused because of COVID. Health care is an example where there was a big backlog, and some upgrades to HVAC and improved filtration. There was a general backlog of construction in small projects, deferred maintenance and new capital projects. Most of the health care projects are smaller and we’re also seeing huge demand in life science. There is nonstop interest in Boston and Massachusetts in general.
Q: What is the profile of SCG’s typical client?
A: We do college, university and health care work directly for hospitals. We work with Waterstone Properties, which is building a cancer center and medical office building at the 100-acre Rock Row in Maine. New England Cancer Specialists is an anchor tenant and it’s 150,000 square feet. We also have life science companies doing base building construction.
Q: How severe is cost escalation in building materials, and how does that affect owners’ decisions before and after groundbreaking?
A: There is a lot of analysis in facility planning with material cost escalation and also labor shortages. I can say speed to market is a driving factor and hasn’t really changed. One higher ed client is actually adding another building to see if they can gain economies and accelerate the second building along with their first. We just try to be flexible and make sure we can pivot as needed. Steel prices went up. Amazon had accelerated their distribution centers and bought a lot of steel joists, and that drove up steel prices. We brought in a lot of the contractors and subcontractors and we were able to maintain the project schedule, and a lot of that is just being nimble. That project was in the independent school market, a 10,000-square-foot expansion. We had to adapt and change the design from steel joists to I-beams.
Q: What are some examples of the types of a la carte consulting services that SCG offers?
A: When clients don’t want to hire us for a full project, we’ll typically do an advisory or light project management role. One client is carving out scheduling and monitoring services on a monthly basis. One client wants us to minor design documents for quality control, and another client basically called us and said, “Once a month, can you fly into the project and we’ll have you review invoices and change orders, and do a site walk.” We try to be very nimble. Not all clients want full project management services.
Q: Which building sectors are the busiest based upon your recent work?
A: The corporate work had slowed down a bit, but is starting to pick up. People are going to be expected to come back, based upon the amount of work we have. We are going to be working on some major ground-up construction projects for major corporations, both national. Development work is strong. A lot of folks want to be in Massachusetts and you have all sorts of developers coming in, whether it’s housing, life science, health care or general commercial.
Q: What are your company’s core geographic markets and expansion plans?
A: Our main headquarters is in Massachusetts and we just opened a satellite office in Exeter, New Hampshire. And we are looking at a satellite office in Nashville. One of our major clients is building out a 70-acre corporate project in Nashville. We have peer partnerships in other parts of the country. We typically follow our relationships. We have a client in Wilmington that asked us to oversee a 20,000-square-foot project in Seattle.
Q: What are some of the common questions from clients on the sustainability front?
A: Most of our clients had started looking at LEED and getting certified. Now we’re moving more toward what makes the most sense for sustainability and less about the formal certifications. We have some clients who want to push the envelope: universities trying to be carbon neutral.
Q: What partnerships have you formed with vendors that improve efficiency?
A: We work with a company from Houston called Rugged Robotics, a startup that just launched an automated rover. Where the trades originally did manual layout for ductwork and walls in the field, you can pump all of the shop drawings from the various trades into the rover and it lays everything out. The next day, the workers come in, everything is preprinted and laid out on the slab. At the end of the day, you’ll have one or two technicians monitoring the rover as it lays out a wall track right on the slab.
Scalora’s Five Favorite Vacation Spots:
- Iceland
- Azores
- Santorini, Greece
- Sienna, Italy
- Taormina, Italy
