| Tony Bond
President and CEO, Bond Brothers Inc.
Age: 37
Industry experience: 15 years
Tony Bond follows a long line of leaders of the family construction business with his recent appointment as the fifth-generation CEO of Bond Brothers Inc. The Medford-based company relies on a steady stream of repeat business, with 90 percent of its projects coming from past clients including many in Greater Boston’s higher education and health care sectors. At the same time, the 114-year-old family business is finding growth opportunities in New York City, where Bond oversaw the launch of its new office in 2016, expanding its civil utility work on the city’s aging infrastructure.
Q: Which tech innovations are having the biggest impact on how you manage projects?
A: Certainly the instantaneous reporting and updating you get on projects have been the biggest change for us. We do a lot of dashboarding and metric-based reporting. It was a lot more qualitative in the past. The superintendent would have daily reports, and you get schedule reports on a monthly basis. Now there’s just a greater depth and feel you can get from the systems and the tracking, getting instantaneous data back to the home office.
Q: How is the company targeting specific geographic markets for growth?
A: We’ve got offices throughout the Northeast, from Boston to Providence and New Haven, New York City and Newark. We’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of the institutional clients in the area as well as the major utility and energy providers. That’s really been our core focus and specialty: building those big complex and challenging projects for the clients that have high profiles and need a contractor who is sensitive to that. If you’re working for Harvard or Leahy Health or MIT or National Grid, those clients have facilities and assets that are important to them, but also to the greater population in some sense. And we take great pride in being able to serve those folks. Part of it is building out the infrastructure for the world to progress. About 90 percent of our work year-over-year is for repeat clients.
Q: What’s the most complex project you’ve personally worked on?
A: Certainly I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been on both the historic building side, and the civil and utility side. In both regards, I’ve had some fun projects. The first project I ever worked on was for Harvard, and it was a project we ended up taking over from another contractor. Right out of college, it was a project that for us had to jump-start immediately. Most building projects get anywhere from a six– to 12-month ramp-up, and we had to hit the ground running. I didn’t get an introduction. We had to get the building going immediately: a new dorm at 10 Akron St. That was certainly a challenging one, being right on the Charles River and Memorial Drive.
Another one was the Paramount Theatre for Emerson College. Logistically building in downtown Boston, it just gave you such an appreciation for the planning and coordination that goes into the delivery of something of that size and scale. The existing building was getting completely retrofitted. If you made one incorrect move, it could set you back significantly. On the civil and utilities side, we were able to build a 5-mile gas transmission line through Boston for a gas transmission client. That was a unique project, because typically most gas projects are built in Pennsylvania through farmland. When you’re cutting through city streets, there’s a wealth of challenges.
Q: What are the trends for project costs in the current construction climate?
A: The biggest driver for us right now is labor concerns. We have a pretty well-built supply chain, but the challenge is getting the qualified labor on the project. Finding the right talent is the biggest thing that keeps us up at night. There are so many projects still being built and under contract. When Boston shut down for two months, that put a stall on a lot of work, but that picked up and there are new projects getting off the ground. You have to make sure you have the right labor and follow the right safety protocols with the abrupt changes in the world.
Q: What’s the business plan behind your new specialty contracting company, BOND Mechanical?
A: Historically, we’ve done a lot of work in the mechanical space. Our mechanical business is located out of our New York City office, and the challenge we’ve seen down there is there’s a lot of commercial builders with new high-rises. There’s not a lot of energy and industrial contractors. Physically getting people to a job site is more challenging than anywhere we’ve worked. We saw a void in the energy and industrial space. With the aging facilities down there, there’s a lot of refurbishment that needs to go on with the existing facilities.
Bond’s Five Favorite New England Ski Destinations
- Sugarbush, Vermont
- Killington, Vermont
- Stowe, Vermont
- Sunday River, Maine
- Loon Mountain, New Hampshire
