The company's heritage dates back to her great-great-grandfather Moses, a master bricklayer who came to the United States as a slave in 1790. His skills were passed down and cultivated from generation to generation, inspiring two of his grandchildren to create architecture. The Tennessee company is also known as McKissack & McKissack.
The company remains in the family and is now based in New York and run by McKissack's twin sister, Cheryl. “My father always took us [to] Job site, took us to the office. “We sat around the table and talked about it. It's always been a very integral part of our family,” McKissack says.
Motivated by a desire to strike out on her own and see more Black female CEOs in the construction industry, McKissack withdrew $1,000 from her savings account and started her company in 1990. She currently makes $25 million to $30 million a year. The company has offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Baltimore and manages $15 billion in projects, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It.
“I remember when I was in college, there were probably three women in my class, and my twin sister was one of them. I mean, it's very rare to have women in this industry. But we’re good,” McKissack said.
McKissack quit his six-figure engineering job to start his company, but even with a civil engineering degree from Howard University and relevant work experience, it's hard to attract customers. I learned the hard way quickly.
She carried around an old projector and showed slides of the work she had done to her family to “sell my wares.” She posted a job ad in the Washington Post and hired an employee.
“It was up and down because no bank believed in me,” McKissack said. “It took him five years to get his first $10,000 loan line. He probably went to 11 banks and was told 'no'… [but] There was a burning passion inside me that I had to do this and it would work for me. ”
An illustration of Moses McKissack, who came to the United States as a slave and became a master carpenter and bricklayer.
Deryl McKissack
She used her networking skills to successfully complete her company's first project: interior work for her alma mater. She and her only employee did all the work themselves, and McKissack put in 80 hours a week, she says.
One successful job led to another, and McKissack built a portfolio of work to refer prospective clients to. She applied for a job with a federal contractor and landed construction projects for the White House and U.S. Treasury buildings. More large-scale federal projects followed.
She said McKissack paid her only $7,200 in her first year on the job. The second is $18,000. She added that after almost a decade of prioritizing paying her employees over herself along the way, she finally paid herself a $100,000 salary.
“I'm very proud of the position we're in, the projects we've done and the impact we've had on people's lives,” McKissack says.
The global construction industry is expected to be worth $13.9 trillion by 2037, according to a 2023 report from market research firm Oxford Economics. However, women still make up only 1.4% of construction CEOs around the world, and Black women make up just a small portion of them.
Despite having the same company name, McKissack and her sister run separate businesses, but they collaborate on several projects and frequently send each other “trade notes,” she said.
“We lean on each other in difficult times, and it's great to have an identical twin in a big city like New York doing the same thing as me,” she says. “The challenges she faces are different than mine, but similar. So it's good to have someone to talk to.”
McKissack sisters Andrea, Cheryl, and Deryl and father William DeBerry.
Deryl McKissack
A healthy support system for most Black and female construction company executives is rare, McKissack said, in large part because there are so few construction company executives. Last year, she founded AEC Unites, a nonprofit organization that provides professional opportunities for Black talent in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries.
“I couldn't be successful until more black people and more women were successful,” she said, adding: Come back and say, “It was a success.'' ”
She hopes one of them will be her daughter. She is a bioengineering student at New York University and could be the sixth generation of McKissacks in the construction industry.
“I always tell her, all roads lead to McKissack,” she says. “And she doesn't care how she gets there.”
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