Interview: Pat Rodgers, President CEO, Rodgers

Prefab focus

The prefabriction building trend can lead to significant efficiences, which proved an advantage during COVID

Pat Rodgers

President & CEO – Rodgers

How has your business unfolded during COVID-19? While 2020 brought us many challenges, we were grateful to close out the year as one of our strongest and highest volume years to-date. While we were able to make progress on some exciting projects, it didn’t come easily, as we had to react and adapt to a new way of operating that came with a global pandemic. In addition to implementing new safety measures, we had several construction measures in place that allowed work to continue. One of those has been the use of prefabrication on our projects. This process has been a key focus for us over the last several years and will continue to evolve as the industry moves in that direction. Prefabrication is exciting and implementing prefab early in the planning phase of a project can result in increased efficiencies, higher quality, reduced overall schedule and safety improvements. One of our largest projects in 2020 implemented prefabrication across several areas of the build, which helped ease operational impacts due to COVID-19.

What can be done to increase the representation of women in the construction and engineering fields? I’m happy to say that since I entered the industry, representation has increased. Although not a dramatic amount, it’s enough to start making a difference. We have more women and minority representation in our industry now than ever before. It’s important that we are making strides to continue enabling and encouraging diversity because, at the end of the day, it will help us all be more successful.

What are the company’s main near-term goals? In 2019, we launched a safety program called Live Safe and we’re heavily focusing on that. Not only do we want our team members to live safely when they are on a project site, we want them safe when they’re home with their families as well. Our main goal every day is to make sure everybody goes home safely to their families. COVID-19 has stressed this goal even more.

We’re also trying to ensure that projects are kept in the pipeline. As we crossed into 2021, the level of new project activity has certainly increased, and we anticipate that will continue and possibly accelerate.

As a region, the Carolinas work well together and have good private-public partnerships. Rodgers has been fortunate to be part of several of these partnerships in Charlotte and Raleigh that have helped build and expand community culture. The Research Triangle was a pioneering public-private partnership that continues to transform the region. In downtown Raleigh, we are working on the expansion and renovation of the Marbles Kids Museum, a partnership with Wake County.