Busting the Glass Ceiling
Rock Solid at the Helm of Hakanson Construction Inc.
Margaret Hakanson didn’t hesitate to step into the leadership role at Hakanson Construction Inc. when her husband, Mike Hakanson, passed away suddenly in 1998. Margaret had worked alongside him on the business side of the concrete tilt-up construction company he founded in 1976. There was no question that she would continue the business and his tradition of avoiding shortcuts.
Margaret, now President of Hakanson Construction, joined her husband’s company full time in 1984 with no prior construction industry experience. She learned the industry by spending time with her husband on job sites where he would carefully explain the tilt-up process. Her role mainly included marking the footings, managing the billing process, obtaining conditional and unconditional releases, preliminary notice filings, calculations on the job bids and doing the manual entries for the ledgers and payroll.
While on the job, Margaret convinced her husband to computerize the systems for all accounting, finance and cost estimating. That led to the development of a proprietary cost-estimating system based on her husband’s wealth of knowledge and experience from his many years in the construction industry. “Each labor line item factor is the result of extensive analysis of actual historical numbers,” she says, “which provides more realistic bid estimating than before.”
“When Mike died, it was so difficult,” she says. “I had been working in the office on the finance and accounting side and my husband was the one who was out on the job site. When it happened, I knew that I had to keep going; the very next day I had to go to work and do the payroll because others were depending upon me. I put one foot in front of the other. I honestly don’t even remember the first year; there was so much to do with insurance and legal issues. I wanted the employees to know I was going to be here for them and I needed to be here for me, too. I still had a mortgage and bills to pay and we were getting busy. I knew that as long as we kept Mike’s theme of building the perfect building with no shims, we would keep going.”
During the early years of the company, they employed six to 12, depending on the jobs under contract, and had sales of approximately $1 million annually. During the ups and downs of the economy, Margaret continued to advertise and keep the company’s brand in the marketplace and was always trying to reach new general contractors, developers and owners. She expanded operations, bidding on increasingly larger projects while adding foremen and crew members.
Teamwork and Fearless Dedication
Retaining quality employees is a big factor in the company’s success, Margaret says. “We provide incentives and profit-sharing plans to maintain that loyalty,” she adds. Before the 2008 crash, the staff had topped out at 80 and annual sales peaked at $16 million. Today there are 26 employees, and the team is continuing to grow. Her stamina, courage and fearless dedication to the company are some of the reasons her team admires and follows her, a colleague tells us. But, if you ask her, much of the success can be attributed to her longtime key employees.
Under her leadership, the company has completed a diverse array of projects, including warehouse buildings, medical office buildings, office parks, distribution centers and manufacturing facilities. The business continues to improve on cost-effective building techniques through the utilization of green and structural concrete technology. As a result, Hakanson Construction has maintained its longstanding reputation for the highest standards of professionalism and accountability in the concrete tilt-up marketplace, says Margaret.
“To offset the slow times in the industry, we’ve been looking to diversify our business so we can keep those quality guys working,” she adds. “That’s part of the impetus for moving into the medical segment, which has come on stronger lately. We’ve done a prestigious medical center, Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino.” The Loma Linda project is a modern three-story, 154,000-square-foot building with 229 exterior windows, erected onto a 51,200-square-foot footprint. Some window openings have curved tops and architectural reveals to enhance the visual appeal. The job required a crawler crane and every major pour had to be boom pumped. The building utilized 7,400 cubic yards of concrete and 820 tons of reinforcing steel with concrete over metal decking for the second and third stories, including the roof. In 30 hours, 51 concrete panels—each 54 feet tall—were raised into place.
“To offset the slow times in the industry, we’ve been looking to diversify our business so we can keep those quality guys working. That’s part of the impetus for moving into the medical segment, which has come on stronger lately.” Margaret Hakanson, President and CEO, Hakanson Construction Inc.
Hakanson Construction built a rare four-story tilt-up building with the Hale Medical Center Building project in Arcadia, Calif., in collaboration with The Hale Corp. and structural engineer Miyamoto. That project earned Hakanson Construction an American Concrete Institute (ACI) award for outstanding performance in design and engineering.
The firm also built the Cal Baptist University Student Recreation Center, which received an award from the Tilt-Up Concrete Association’s 2013 TCA Tilt-Up Achievement Award – Educational Division category. This project featured a specialized use of space and architectural use of exterior elevations. The tilt-up component consisted of concrete masonry unit walls, new tilt-up panels and existing tilt-up panels retrofitted to meet the new athletic center’s special requirements.
In addition to continuing to work on a diverse array of remarkable projects, Margaret’s progressive, forward-thinking approach to running her husband’s business demonstrates, concretely, that there’s no glass ceiling holding her back from future success in the world of concrete tilt-up construction.