Mike Jones – Tarlton

On a good day at BJC Alton Memorial Hospital, a surgeon is closing up a patient in one operating room while, on the other side of a temporary wall, crews are pouring concrete for the next one. That’s the reality Mike Jones manages every day: building a hospital’s future without ever asking its present to pause. It’s the kind of coordination problem most contractors would find overwhelming. For Jones, it’s the whole appeal.

From fulfillment centers to operating rooms

Jones didn’t start out in hospitals. Fresh out of college, he spent his early career installing automated fulfillment systems for Amazon, crisscrossing the country to get massive, fast-moving warehouse operations up and running. The work gave him an early, intensive education in large-scale coordination — how to move people, equipment, and timelines together without anything falling out of sync. In 2015, he pivoted into construction management, and healthcare quickly became his niche, pairing his technical curiosity with a pull toward work that served the public more directly.

That healthcare focus led him to Tarlton, the St. Louis-based general contracting and construction management firm marking its 75th year in business. In that time, the $200 million company has built a reputation across the Midwest not just for technical expertise but for the relationships behind it — a distinction reinforced by its status as a WBENC-Certified Women’s Business Enterprise committed to fostering inclusion and opportunity. Tarlton’s projects span commercial, institutional, and industrial markets, but the throughline across all of them, employees say, is a people-first culture that hands its project leaders real latitude to adapt. Seventy-five years in, the firm still measures its success as much by the trust and community it builds around each project as by the buildings themselves.

Jones has leaned into that latitude. He earned his Health Care Construction certification early in his tenure and is now working toward the more advanced Certified Health Care Constructor credential, sharpening his grasp of the planning, safety, and compliance details unique to hospital work — details that carry real weight when the buildings in question can’t stop functioning while they’re being rebuilt. It’s a far cry from the fulfillment centers where he started, but the underlying skill set, he’s found, translates more directly than most people would expect: both worlds reward the person who can keep a dozen moving parts synchronized without losing sight of the people the work is ultimately for.

Leading with adaptability

As a senior project manager in Tarlton’s healthcare division, Jones now oversees more than $200 million in active healthcare work, leading 10 to 12 direct reports — project engineers, project managers, estimators, and superintendents — and reporting to the company’s Director of Construction. His leadership style resists easy labels; he moves between democratic, laissez-faire, and situational approaches depending on what a given team or moment requires, favoring trust and flexibility over rigid oversight while still holding the line on safety, communication, and client satisfaction. Colleagues describe that flexibility as one of his defining traits — a willingness to adjust his approach to whoever is standing in front of him, whether that’s a first-year engineer or a hospital administrator anxious about a looming deadline.

That adaptability shows up most clearly on the kind of multi-year hospital projects where plans inevitably shift. At BJC Alton Memorial Hospital in Illinois, Jones is leading a $30 million phased renovation that will add ten operating rooms and new PACU space, with construction proceeding one or two ORs at a time so the hospital never loses full functionality. Pre-construction on the project began back in 2018, and with an Illinois Department of Public Health certificate now secured, the first phase — the new OR and PACU space — is underway on a roughly one-year timeline within a project expected to span five years total. Jones leans on tools like Procore for project tracking, MATACOR site scanning, and BIM modeling for clash detection, balancing state inspections and tight budget restraints while keeping clients, contractors, and hospital staff aligned through what is, by any measure, a high-pressure environment.

Building healthcare that never stops

Jones is applying the same playbook elsewhere in the region. At SSM Health’s Saint Louis University Hospital, he’s guiding construction of a new surgical suite in the Bordley Tower — five operating rooms, a PACU, and a central sterile processing room designed to expand capacity for outpatient procedures like cataract, spine, hip, and knee surgeries. With drawings moving through procurement ahead of a December 2025 start, the roughly ten-month build will lean on off-site modular ceiling units, assembled Lego-style before installation, to keep the fast-tracked schedule on pace.

A third project is reshaping care access rather than expanding it. For Washington University School of Medicine, Jones is overseeing the relocation of behavioral health services into a renovated, 36,000-to-40,000-square-foot former training center in South County — a dual-use facility that will also house Washington University’s physical therapy programs. The project, running from a November 2025 launch to a planned completion next May, fills what Jones and his team describe as a real care gap for an underserved part of the region, requiring him to balance the needs of two institutional stakeholders inside a single, phased delivery.

Measured, steady growth

Across all three projects, what stands out isn’t just the scale — it’s the emotional intelligence Jones brings to keeping people aligned when timelines, budgets, and clinical needs pull in different directions. That steadiness is central to how Tarlton talks about its own growth: the company’s leaders describe an approach built on empathy and collaboration, one that treats projects as technical challenges and relationship challenges at once. Investing in leaders like Jones, the thinking goes, strengthens both the individual careers involved and the company’s broader impact.

Jones’ own goals track closely with that philosophy. He’s aiming to keep expanding Tarlton’s healthcare portfolio, with an eye toward adding roughly $50 million in annual revenue as the firm works to position itself as the premier contractor in St. Louis and beyond — growth he’d rather see arrive steadily than all at once.

Outside of work, Jones is a family man first: he and his wife are raising two young sons, Mack and Levi, ages five and three. He’s also a former rugby player who still gets on the pitch when his schedule allows, even if the sport reminds him he isn’t twenty-five anymore.

“At 39, you feel every bump when you get up,” Jones says.

It’s a fitting line for a project manager who spends his days building around the immovable — hospitals that can’t close, patients who can’t wait, teams that need a steady hand more than a rigid plan. Jones has built a career, and now a growing slice of St. Louis’s healthcare infrastructure, on exactly that kind of resilience.