Driving around town, Laura Blanchette gets to play a game with her kids that few people can. It involves pointing out structures that she had a hand in bringing from concept to completion.
” ‘We built that, we built that,’ ” she said. “Now they do it, too.”
Blanchette is director of business development at PM Construction Co. Inc. in Saco. Her company has built grocery stores, drug stores, movie theaters, distribution centers, banks, schools, medical centers and just about every other type of establishment you can contemplate.
As communities in Maine and the rest of New England continue to become more heavily developed, construction managers have become a hot commodity.
The job of business development, just one of several management jobs in the construction industry, involves working closely with clients to ensure that their vision is ultimately manifested in bricks and mortar just as they imagined it.
It isn’t always easy, Blanchette said. It involves an extreme exercise in good communication that can sometimes resemble extracting ideas like teeth from a client’s head.
“My old boss used to say, ‘When you’re done with a conversation, always ask three more questions,'” she said. “It’s about finding out what the client wants.”
Construction management is an exciting profession that presents a different challenge every day and allows you to feel the pride of seeing a project through from beginning to end, Blanchette said.
It pulls you into the orbit of a wide variety of clients, from small-business entrepreneurs to leaders of giant corporations. Some walk in the door with carefully designed plans in hand, others with little more than a passion and vision for what they hope to build.
“You get to see a lot of professions and work with a lot of different people,” Blanchette said.
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