Jeff Rankin – Clune Construction

One January many years ago, Jeff Rankin showed up for work at 6 a.m. He was a teenager with no particular plan for his life, but he had received an unusual offer from a neighbor: come work on concrete and see what happens. The morning was cold, the hours were long. He did it anyway.

“I didn’t really have any desire to do it,” Rankin says. “I just kind of fell into something that I love.”

That moment set into motion a career that would take Rankin from poured concrete in the DC Metro Area to structural steel across Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines and China — and eventually to the role of Senior Project Manager, Team Lead at Clune Construction, a national, employee-owned general contractor that provides construction management and general contracting services. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Chicago, Clune has built a reputation for tackling technically demanding projects with skilled, collaborative teams. For Rankin, it is a place that finally matches the range of experience he spent two decades accumulating across some of the most demanding and geographically diverse construction environments in the world.

Building a foundation, continent by continent

After that first job in concrete, Rankin transitioned into a field engineering apprenticeship and was later pulled in to run estimating and project management for a small carpentry and construction firm when its previous manager fell ill. A year and a half in, his life took a sharp turn: he found a new adventure and relocated to Australia.

What followed was a decade-plus of international work that reads less like a resume and more like a travelogue. Starting again as a laborer in Australia, Rankin eventually broke into structural steel, traveling across the continent on large projects before expanding into Vietnam, the Philippines and China. He took on quality assurance, installation, coordination and delivery for companies building structural steel across international markets. Over time, he became a consultant for the same group, overseeing shop drawings and rigging operations for structural steel fabricators in Australia by utilizing his Vietnam located shop drawing business and rigging business located in Australia.

Then, in 2018, the market shifted. The Grenfell Tower fire in the year prior in the United Kingdom raised widespread alarm over building cladding materials, and development in Australia — home to many structures with similar facades — effectively ground to a halt. Nobody knew who was responsible for remediation costs, and construction activity slowed dramatically. Rankin pivoted his shop drawing business into estimating to sustain income and, by mid-2019, made the difficult decision to step away from the shop drawing company and rigging business he had built. He is quick to acknowledge that not every chapter of his career went smoothly, but he is equally quick to note that the difficult years taught him as much as the successful ones.

Learning the 20 percent

Back in the U.S., Rankin joined a general contractor managing interiors of commercial construction projects, eventually joining Clune in 2023, where he found something he had not always had: a team to lead within an organization whose structure aligned with how he believed work should feel.

Clune is an ESOP, meaning it is employee owned and every individual has a financial stake in the organization’s success. For Rankin, that structure was not a minor detail in deciding to make the change in jobs.t creates a supportive and teamwork-centered environment,”. “Everyone in the company literally works for one another.”

His approach to unfamiliar projects is equally direct. Rankin has long operated under what he calls the 80/20 rule: 80% of any construction project is essentially the same; the remaining 20% is what requires figuring out. He frames that twenty percent as the most important planning exercise on any job — identifying long-lead items, locating potential problems early and determining whether the team has the expertise to take it on before work begins.

“I think if I started getting past the 80 percent threshold, I’d be getting bored with the work,” he says. “I’m focused on new and interesting things.”

That philosophy was put to the test on a recent nuclear pharmacy build — Clune’s first facility of that kind. The team leaned heavily on client and end-user feedback, building processes from scratch and earning enough trust that the owner now turns to Rankin’s superintendent directly for input on future decisions.

When coordination becomes the craft

A project for an appliance technology company offered a different kind of complexity. Rankin’s team was tasked with building a 6,200-square-foot experiential showroom beneath a hotel and conference center, featuring roughly 20 fully equipped kitchen setups with 60 to 70 connected appliances, extensive tiling and a substantial electrical infrastructure that included a large transformer and seven or eight electrical panels. Noise restrictions imposed by the building above shaped nearly every decision about sequencing and scheduling.

“We had to negotiate with the client and building owner,” Rankin says, “and eventually shut down a wing of the hotel so we could work at night.”

The team moved carefully through the noisiest hours at night and returned to regular schedules once the work quieted. The project was among the most publicly visible Rankin had managed in years — and one of the most rewarding.

Looking ahead, Rankin’s team is increasingly focused on specialized verticals: medical facilities, life sciences, secure spaces and high-end interiors, where both technical demands and client expectations are high. His personal goals center on rising within Clune’s leadership structure, while continuing to grow and develop the people working alongside him. It is an orientation less toward individual achievement and more toward the kind of long-term team building that an ESOP culture tends to reward.

“My biggest goal is to keep growing the people on my team so they can eventually surpass me in skillset and abilities,” he says.

Rankin’s transition to Clune’s Mission Critical practice represents a full-circle moment in his career. Before spending the last six years helping clients bring complex interior environments to life, he built his foundation managing large-scale construction projects. Drawing on the leadership, technical expertise, and client-focused approach developed throughout both phases of his career, Rankin is excited to embrace this next challenge and help deliver the mission-critical facilities that are shaping the future of the industry.