Name: Lee Michael Kennedy
Title: President and Chief Executive Officer
Age: 44
Years of experience: 26 years
At a time where the economy is dragging its feet in the mud, a Quincy-based contractor is carefully moving forward, picking and choosing projects in a variety of market segments as the opportunities arise.
Lee Kennedy & Co. has experience working in the commercial, retail/restaurant, hospitality and institutional markets, and while other developers sit and wait for the next big-buzz project, this local firm understands the importance of the smaller-scale opportunities that are still available during this tough time.
The word of the day is diversification, according to Lee Michael Kennedy, president and chief executive officer of Lee Kennedy & Co. He recently sat down with Banker & Tradesman to explain.
What types of opportunities are you looking at for the year ahead?
I think, for 2009 and 2010, I see us mostly doing smaller-sized projects: infrastructure projects for institutions, deferred maintenance projects for institutions, smaller-scaled renovation projects. The bigger, larger-capital projects are the ones that are being shelved and reassessed as to how important they might be to various institutions.
What type of projects do you think will help Boston through the recession?
You hear talk in the media and from certain areas of the community about large-scale projects – there’s been some recent ones that have gotten news coverage. When I think of that, I don’t think of that as being favorable for Boston. I think smaller-scale projects, mid-rises, 10-, 15-, 20-story buildings. If you take one project that might be 50, 60, 70, 80 stories, … and you take that and make it into three or four different projects, it provides for more diversity, the scale of buildings are better for Boston and there’s actually more construction jobs that come out of it.
Are you seeing more activity in some of the market segments that you deal with, more than in others?
We do a lot in the college and university market, and there are still a lot of projects that are moving forward in the $1 million- to $25 million-sized projects. You have schools like Dean College down in Franklin that has a $13-million project that’s about to come on line that we’ll be bidding for. Then, there’s Boston College which has continued to move forward with part of their first initial phases of their master plan. So, it seems to be sporadic with the colleges and universities.
Hospitals similarly, but they seem to be affected even a little bit more than the colleges and universities, with the lack of debt available due to the credit crunch.
Commercial development is pretty much in a complete shutdown mode until these banks start flowing money to them again.
To any developers out there who may be struggling right now, what, if any, advice would you give them?
I think one advantage, whether you’re a developer or an institution, is that the construction dollar goes a lot further now. Now is the time, like if you’re a first-time homebuyer. If you’ve got money and you’ve got a job, what a great opportunity to get your first house at a discount. The same holds true in construction. Construction costs globally are way down. Resources, labor, everything. All the prices have come way down, so you can build so much more. You can get so much more bang for your buck now, probably since we’ve seen in the ’90s. I would say pricing is down, from a year to two years ago, to close to 15 percent. So it’s that significant.
You do a lot of self-performance, your own carpenters, laborers working on a project instead of subcontracting the work out. Why don’t a lot of other companies do that?
Construction managers moved away from it because it’s another form of risk … the business has been a lot about risk management for the past 15 years. It’s good front-line presentation of your company. If you subcontract that out, who are they going to be more obligated to, the subcontractor or you?
Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Lee Michael Kennedy:
Kennedy is a hockey fanatic and has played since he was 4 up until four or five years ago. His favorite players are Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr because they both changed the game, and they’re also great people.
Kennedy is a Bruce Springsteen fan and has seen Springsteen play live in concert more than 50 times. He first heard the “Born to Run” album back in 1975, and fell in love with the music.
Kennedy owns two Harley-Davidson motorcycles: a 1999 Softail Custom and a 2001 Custom Wide Glide.
He interned for Sen. John Kerry in his freshman term as a U.S. Senator in 1984, and learned a lot about how the political experience works.
While at St. Joseph College, Kennedy received the Clio Award for high achievement as a history major student.
