Case Studies Region: Southeast

Rob Jeffcoat arrived in Charleston with a Clemson diploma, a sports management degree, and a city full of friends. After graduating in 2012, he landed a recreation coordinator position with the small town of Hanahan, just north of the city. He loved the work — organizing programs, connecting with the community, watching people thrive — […]

Growing up in Suffolk, Virginia, Nick Hamilton was raised in a project family, where weekends and evenings were often spent fixing, improving, and caring for the things they had. Work was not something outsourced by default; it was something the family took on together. That mindset followed him early. As a teenager, Hamilton’s father volunteered […]

As a young teenager in a small town outside Dallas, where his graduating class numbered just over 40 students, Ragan Henderson grew up embracing every opportunity to compete. Throughout his high school years, he starred in football, track and field, baseball, and powerlifting, earning All-State honors in each. Learning to balance multiple commitments at an […]

Radelmis Rosario has built a career making the invisible essential — turning Cambrex‘s Durham facility into a catalyst for the science that changes lives. When a 50°C walk-in stability chamber had to be designed, built, and operational in under a month, most facilities professionals would have penciled in a realistic six-month timeline and pushed back. […]

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. […]

Tim Blankenship did not arrive in the concrete industry through a planned career track. He entered at 23, willing to work hard, learn quickly, and start at the bottom. That decision launched a multi-decade path that took him from laborer to senior project manager and helped shape one of the Midwest’s growing polished concrete operations. […]

Jeff McNeely still remembers the beer tankard that dates back to the late 17th century. Buried for a few hundred years in an old well on the grounds of Drayton Hall, it was only recently uncovered by the preservation team’s archaeologists, dirt-caked and impossibly intact. McNeely wasn’t the one who pulled it from the ground, […]

Most people who work in college athletics for nearly two decades start to look a little worn. The early mornings, the road trips, the endless recruiting calls — it adds up. Ron Pavan is not most people. “Everyone wonders why I smile,” he says, settling into a conversation with the ease of someone who genuinely […]

At an early age, Jon Dilts was already clocking in. Growing up on a family farm in Ohio, there was no such thing as a day off — chores began before school and picked up again after, regardless of the weather or the season. It wasn’t a job so much as a way of life, […]

The roads, runways, intersections, and transportation systems that people rely on every day rarely draw much attention when they are working properly. Drivers expect traffic signals to function, airport runways to stay illuminated, and roadways to remain safe. Behind those systems, however, are teams of construction professionals whose work often goes unnoticed but has a […]