I first met Russ Burns when introduced to him by Hal Parmelee, the then Chair of Clayco’s Board of Directors, who agreed to help me find someone to run the company after learning that my wife, Ellen, was gravely ill.
There are all kinds of important parts of the story that have to do with Ellen, but this story is about Russ. Russ’s connection to Ellen was one of pure compassion, and the real reason Russ finally agreed to come and help run the organization. Ellen was my junior high sweetheart, whom I married in 1984, the same year I started Clayco. She was an amazing mom, wife, and friend to many and an inspirational person who was diagnosed with a terminal, genetic disease in 2005. At the time, I was told that she was going to have a brutal existence and that she would probably only live a couple more years. Little was known about the genetic disease then, and there was not enough data to understand how or what exactly would happen. But the night that Ellen was diagnosed, her doctor called me and privately shared that I was going to have to take care of her. He knew I had a large, complicated business, and I could not run it while caring for Ellen. The doctor was right, and that call, in and of itself, was an act of compassion.
Then, Hal Parmelee, my mentor and advisor since 2000, stepped in to help me identify a new president. Hal had been a 50-year tenured leader at Turner Construction, the largest construction company in the United States. In 1999, Turner was sold to a German company, and Hal decided to leave without a plan. He was in good enough financial shape to retire. Still, I saw an opportunity to learn from Hal’s unique attributes and leadership principles as Turner’s past President; I needed his help. After a couple of quick meetings, he joined my Board.
After Ellen’s diagnosis, I decided that I didn’t have the bandwidth and structure in place in the organization to step away, so I made leadership changes and vacated the position of president so we could find somebody who would really step in and run a large, complicated business and even grow, thrive and create new opportunities within the enterprise.
I interviewed three or four people who were all strong candidates, and then Hal called me with this strange idea. He knew this fellow who had been on the Executive Leadership Team at Turner and was a mentee of his who decided to leave the construction business to spend more time with his wife, Alison, and son, Tyler. At the time, this man was writing a children’s gospel book and taking night courses to become a minister. Before his construction career, Russ was a veteran US Air Force pilot, and after serving as a major, flying C-130 and other sophisticated aircraft, he continued to fly for the Tennessee National Guard. When Hal first mentioned him, it was not obvious to me that Russ Burns would be a great choice, but I thought it would be worth having a meeting.
Reluctantly, and only because of his deep respect for Hal, Russ flew up and spent the day with Hal and me. He was very clear, from the beginning, that he was not getting back into the construction business. The idea of relocating to St. Louis from his hometown of Nashville, or taking on something new in an industry he had just left was not appealing.
But, it was love at first sight. I think we both enjoyed our time together immensely and had an instant connection. I really felt like I had a brotherhood with him, and I could tell our values were a perfect match. I’m sure Russ had the same instinct because, after a couple more conversations, he agreed that although he would not join Clayco fulltime under any circumstance, he would commit to coming on as a consultant three days a week. He agreed to spend a few months tinkering with the company and work really hard to help me find Clayco’s next president.
Now, I can say… that not for one second did I mentally agree that was going to be the arrangement. I immediately set my ambitious sights on keeping Russ engaged in the business and sucking him into my trap…and what a great trap it’s been for both of us.
Within six to eight weeks of Russ coming to the Clayco office three days a week as a “consultant,” it became apparent that everybody in the company was not only impressed with him but was also following him (including me). He had become the leader, of all of us, in very short order. Of course, his experience at Turner was invaluable; he started bringing rigidity, processes, and other types of disciplined thinking that had occurred to us but that we had never implemented. Now, we had somebody who wasn’t theoretical, but that could show us how to instill all the traits we needed in our business to get to the next level.
Within six or eight months, it became obvious that Russ needed a more formal arrangement with us and that he was falling for the company the same way we were all falling for him.
“OK, OK, OK.” He said,” I think I could give this a try.” We decided on an experiment and arranged a 3-day work week and commute from Nashville as president. The deal did last for a while, but eventually, he became so engaged in the business that we mutually agreed to relocate him and his amazing family to St. Louis and the condition that he would go to night school at Covenant Theological Seminary and become an ordained minister. I had to laugh (we both did) in the acknowledgement that the assignment had never been temporary; he just didn’t know it.
Russ has a unique leadership skill that was amazing from the start. He has a totally natural ability to instill complete trust and confidence. He was a leader that inspired those around him to want to succeed not just for themselves or the company, but also for him. However, Russ would admit that our enterprise was what he needed to prove and hone his ability to make people think better, execute better, and make the hard, consistent decisions that make an organization tick. It really redefined leadership as all of us knew it.
Clayco has learned an enormous amount of elegant language and sayings from Russ - we call them “Russ-isms”. For example, when we might disagree on some direction, which he would never admit he did, Russ would reply with “Now, don’t hear what I’m not sayin”. When things were bleak, Russ would say “I’ve got good news for you…I’ve read the last chapter and everything turns out fine!” Or my personal favorite, when we are debating doing something bold or controversial, Russ will sometimes say “We can bite a hog in the ass if that’s what we want to do…”
The executive team members at Clayco were all growing and becoming better people together, and Russ and I formed a true bond of friendship. We were mentors and mentees to each other, the kind of trust and partnership that’s second only to marriage. I can’t think of another person in my life outside of marriage who has had so much impact on me as an individual while, at the same time, working together to create a successful business beyond both of our imaginations.
Russ and I don’t always agree on everything, and we don’t think exactly alike. We definitely play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Due to our incredible level of trust that cannot be broken, we’ve taken leaps of faith when it comes to different concepts and ideas, including growing leadership, various team members, business units, and types of structural changes to the enterprise through turning over complete and absolute trust in all things financial, banking, bonding and insurance.
In 2007 or so, the company had revenues of $700 million. We were profitable, and I’m going to say in 2007, not including the substantial real estate profits, our earnings were in the comfortable eight figures. We felt like we had a great thing going.
Then, to be tested by fire, the Great Recession began hitting Clayco early. We learned in late 2007 that smart companies like Proctor & Gamble were starting to get nervous about cracks in the financial armor of the United States and were piling up cash. We heeded those warnings and put drastic measures in place to prepare for what would be a true test for the business and for me personally. I had accumulated over $650 million of personal debt in real estate “outside” the company and in less than a year Lehman Brothers collapsed. As a result, I was generally in “work-out” mode for the next four years. At the same time, Ellen was deteriorating and would eventually pass away by the Spring of 2010.
I can honestly say I did not have my eye on the core business, and without Russ, I’m just not sure how we would’ve navigated what was very choppy water – in a small boat. But with Russ at the helm, by 2010, while most construction companies were still reeling, we instead had a record profit and had set ourselves on a path to actually grow every year through the Great Recession.
Sometime around 2011, I turned to Russ and asked him, in addition to the other things he was focused on, if he could put a boost into our sales and business development strategies. I can remember the conversation very clearly, and Russ almost immediately started making an impact on the sales organization while also doing terrific work at his day job running operations.
After Ellen passed to the heavens, Russ gave me an unbelievable gift – he took on an even larger role in the company so that I could take almost a complete year off. Six months before Ellen passed, and six months afterward, I was 100% AWOL from the business. In fact, when I returned from my trip around the world in the summer of 2010, I didn’t even go back to St. Louis. St. Louis was too painful for me, so I relocated to Chicago into an apartment and had no exact plans to return to the business. Russ and my other partners gave me a lot of rope, to say the least. We had a successful suburban Chicago office in Oakbrook Terrace that Steve Sieckhaus and Kevin McKenna started, but I felt the energy and the potential was in the downtown city. Eventually, like I have all my life, I started accumulating talent, leased a small office floor in the 35 E. Wacker Jeweler’s Building in Chicago and started a new life in the Second City, which would really become my home. When I moved to Chicago in 2010, three of my kids relocated there, and we all forged a new way forward together.
At some point, I realized I had hired 22 people, and we were all jammed into 6,000 square- feet of space downtown in the Jewelers Building on East Wacker. So, in 2012, we decided, with the (enthusiastic) urging of Rahm Emanuel, to relocate our Oakbrook Terrace office downtown and make Chicago our enterprise HQ. Again, this was a move that could not have been accomplished without Russ’s steady hand in the business. He trusted my instincts and judgment, even though they were probably heavily flawed at the time and helped me make my new dreams come true.
While I was building a true headquarters operation in Chicago, Russ held down the fort in St. Louis. He continued to grow the operations there as the company went on a crusade of growth rarely seen before in the construction business. From 2013 to 2023, we grew from $1 billion to $6 billion while growing our profit at an annual clip twice the percentage of our revenue growth each year. Moreover, we did so while maintaining (and strengthening) the core elements of our culture, preserving what differentiated us (what I think makes this company great), while embracing new ideas and technologies that would lay the groundwork to someday win the future. In fact, Russ had a knack for that. He took the time to really understand the business and what made it special right from the beginning and took care that while much of the company at times needed a little disruption, to do so in a way that always enhanced the culture and DNA of the enterprise instead of detracting from it. He encouraged new talent and other leaders within the organization to do the same.
As a result, the company became safer, more stable, more profitable, and, most importantly, an unbeatable choice for our people and our customers alike, who trust us with their most complex mission-critical projects across North America.
In 2019, the company had record revenue and record profit, going into one of the greatest threats to our business since the Great Recession. The great pandemic, which we fully became aware of in late February 2020, was upon us and so we started implementing our crisis management plan, which we affectionately called our “crash plan.” However, by April and May, we had decided this period would be more of an opportunity than a threat to our business. In fact, our e-commerce business ballooned off the charts, and so we accelerated our growth and the scale and complexity of our projects. Simultaneously, while other companies were closing shop or going to remote work, we leveraged the opportunity to greatly expand our geographic footprint by creating our West Coast Regional offices in Culver City, California and Phoenix, Arizona.
Russ was at the helm of all of these major strategic decisions and even more so when President Biden appointed me as the Commissioner General of the USA Pavilion at the World Expo held in Dubai. I was gone for eight months from the end of 2021 through the beginning of 2022. Since it was an official State Department appointment, I had to take a complete leave of absence from Clayco and resign from all posts and board positions. I depended on Russ Burns 100% to navigate the enterprise, yet again, to another record year of revenue and profit. It almost hurt my feelings how well the business did while I was absent…
In the middle of his Clayco career, Russ told me he would never leave the business without a complete strategy and succession plan. In 2023 and 2024, we worked diligently to implement that plan. I have tremendous confidence that the Russ Burns plan for the future will exceed all our expectations and stand the test of time.
Much of that future will be housed in St Louis in the New RUSSELL BURNS BUILDING. A 233,000 square-foot, world-class facility that will be home to over 1,000 team members Building Beyond These Walls!
I have a feeling Russ will be closer than a phone call away, but I endeavor to give him and his family the time together they so richly deserve.
