Her Story
About Allison
Allison Hess serves as Project Coordinator at Western Timber Frame, a role she has held in its current form for about a year but has performed for roughly seven and a half years. She has spent her entire career in the construction industry, beginning with work at a lumber store and joining Western Timber Frame over nine years ago as a part-time receptionist at the front desk. As the company grew, she applied for and advanced into new positions, playing a key part in shifting the customer service department into a fully-fledged project management department that emphasizes customer-facing and project-focused care. In her daily work, Hess acts as a translator across departments, ensuring manufacturing has needed materials on time, coordinating site schedules with customers, and handing off completed projects to billing. She sees significant opportunity in the industry for adopting leaner manufacturing processes to improve timelines, profitability, and client trust.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Allison
01What do you attribute your success to?
To showing up. Consistency and communication will keep you and everyone else running even when thing go wrong.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Be tenacious in following up. It's ok to keep bugging people :)
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Just ask. I had that on a sticky note on my desk back when I was a receptionist. A man asked me "If you were the owner of this company, what would you do different?" And my response was, "I would probably just ask about the things I wanted to know and didn't understand." I think when we work in a male dominated field, people respond well to people who genuinely want to know.We have to ask, and then we can understand and then we are able to execute.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One of the big opportunities we're facing in the construction industry in general is learning how to lean up our manufacturing. We're learning how to get leaner and leaner, so that our timelines get cleaner and cleaner. We're getting a lot better at systems and understanding those, and if we can continue on that trajectory and have lean manufacturing processes, we're gonna find ourselves making more money, because it's more profitable to be on time, but also with happier customer-facing relations, and a better trust built between each other in an industry, and with our clients.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
When we see people as people, and not as objects in our way, we understand the world around us more and become better problem solvers.
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