The CEO of Landis Construction says hospitality sector is a bright spot.The project is in the early stages of development — so early that the developer named in a letter informing neighbors about the plans, Arts Design Hospitality + Development, is not registered with the state.
Since 2015, Anne Teague Landis has been at the helm of Landis Construction, the construction company founded by her grandfather, Fred Landis, in 1956, and, later, run by her father, Jim Landis. She is one of a growing number of female executives in the construction business and is focused on making the field more accessible to women, whether in the board room, the back office or out in the field.
We sat down with Landis to talk about how to encourage more women to join the industry and to find out what Landis Construction — which currently has about $55 million in revenues — is working on these days.
What kind of work is Landis doing right now and in what markets?
Well, 2020 was going to be a significant growth year for us until COVID, so we are excited to be starting up that trajectory again. Right now, we have a lot of education projects going on: Behrman Elementary in Algiers, Nunez Community College, Delgado Community College.
We’re also doing work at the Hotel Monteleone and have a couple of other things in the hopper that are not underway yet. We just started renovating the River Garden Apartments, and we do a lot of multifamily and a lot of high compliance projects that are HANO-HUD related. We are also doing a lot of office renovations, a project for Green Coast Enterprises Uptown, and we’re getting ready to start a small surgery office on Magazine Street. So, it kind of runs the gamut.
You took over in 2015, the third generation to run the company. Was this something you were preparing for your whole life?
One of my parents’ friends remembers me saying when I was 8 years old that I wanted to run Landis when I grew up. But I went away from that for a long time in my young adulthood. I did work for the company on weekends and summer breaks in high school and college, but I thought I was going to go into educational psychology as a researcher and got my bachelor’s accordingly.
Then, I was doing a stint at the company post college and just fell in love with working here. I loved the physical aspect of it. It was special working with my dad. He never laid out an expectation for me or my three sisters to end up in the business. He left that up to us. I’m the only one here at this point and my first cousin Sarah, also Fred Landis’ granddaughter. She is our vice president of operations.
Was it a difficult transition? Did you feel comfortable coming into your family’s company and taking agency of it?
I had been back with the company since 2008 so I had kind of been able to feel things out, make lots of mistakes, learn to grow more patient with change and change initiatives. I ended up going back to business school in the evening, so by the time 2015 came around we had been working on transition for a while.
Are there more women in the company today than 10 years ago?
In the field, yes, but at the executive level, we have always had women in project management so it’s pretty much stable.
Tell me about women in construction. They are very much underrepresented.
Yes, and that was hard to see when I came into this field because it was less of a thing at Landis than in the industry overall. But the first conference I went to after becoming CEO, there were a few hundred attendees in the room, and you could literally count the women on one hand.
That is when it kind of clicked for me: We are different and unique. Before that, I didn’t have a real appreciation for what women face as barriers and so it made me more attuned to helping other women and recognizing the importance of professional groups and even just acknowledging that it is a thing.
What are some of the barriers?
Just being outnumbered is a barrier. Or like, if we have a service provider who is entertaining Landis people on a fishing trip, they’re going to, by default, invite the men. We have five people on our executive leadership team. Two of them are women and almost always the three guys are going to be invited first. That is where you really notice it. The networking and out-of-the-office opportunities to connect.
Do we need more women in the sector?
I think so. Diversity of thought is hugely important and comes from diversity of background and experience, and women are naturally going to have a different work view than men.
To achieve that, do we need to encourage more young women to major in construction management, engineering programs?
It depends. When I was in business school, people would ask me why I was going back to school, when I already knew a lot about the business. For me, it was an opportunity to jumpstart my learning and when I had to take accounting, I had all these immediate “aha” moments, which benefitted my work here. But experience in the field is also invaluable so I think you need both. We have lots of people here who don’t have four-year degrees and are at very high levels in the company. But an investment in formal education is not a bad investment. It’s just a different way in.
What is the status of the market? How healthy is the market in the areas where you are competing?
The pipeline here seems to be pretty good. Our preconstruction department is very, very busy. But I was speaking to another general contractor last week and they’re not seeing as much work.
So, sometimes it is happenstance. One bright spot on our horizon, locally, is our tourism and convention business. All that requires construction. We have the Super Bowl coming in 2025. So, all the hotels want to put their best foot forward and are investing. There are also big investments like the River District, Michoud, the Charity Hospital site. That’s all very positive.
What has changed in the last couple of years is the amount of time it takes from the moment a project is conceived to the moment construction starts. Part of that is the pricing environment, with supply chain issues and inflation. I hope prices come down. Now we’re seeing lumber prices come down. That’s encouraging. But the cost of milling has not gone down. Labor has not gone down. So, it doesn’t happen linearly.
How are crime and quality-of-life factors impacting your work, if at all?
Workforce remains a challenge. We are starting the River Garden renovation and one of the requirements, because it’s a pilot grant, is that there be a significant number of employees from Orleans Parish. That is harder and harder to find — whether because they dropped out of the workforce or relocated. I don’t know but it’s a lot harder than it was three years ago.
With respect to crime, our employees are often concerned, even in the middle of the day, if they have to go somewhere where they don’t feel comfortable and safe. It is creating stress on them and affects their quality of life and productivity.
What do you see on the horizon for New Orleans?
We have our fair share of problems but so do many other places. The storms are obviously scary and they’re becoming more frequent. The crime is obviously a problem. We have to do a better job of showing at-risk youth that there is a good pathway and good opportunity and then help make those connections and not just talk about them.
Taking real concrete steps towards solutions is something I think we’re still missing the mark on.
I am optimistic. I expect Landis to continue being here for the long term. What my kids do, I have no idea. But I think we have a ton of opportunity and potential. It’s just a matter of making some hard, short-term choices, like funding infrastructure. It is frustrating to hear people say, “Why should we pay for this? It’s an old problem.” True, but if we don’t, then what is the option? We can’t ignore the current state because we feel like someone else should have done something before now. They didn’t. So let’s look forward and figure out how to move forward.
Full article: https://www.nola.com/news/business/article_3ce8b71c-4e33-11ed-880b-d7c4ecfe884b.html