Hannah Lint

I was a single mother before I met my husband - we've only been married 5 years. My first degree was in hospitality, because Mississippi Gulf Coast has 13 casinos and I wanted to be a casino host. But when I had my daughter, I learned that every holiday is spent working, and I was like, okay, I knew I had the basis of construction. I wasn't the best in math in high school, but I knew that I had this drive and this hunger in me to give my daughter what's important in life and what I didn't have growing up. So I pushed myself working 50 hours a week for the metal roofing company and working myself through an engineering degree as a single mom. My daughter was my driving factor to push myself to where I am today, and to keep going and showing her that through military moves, through marriage, as a single mom, that this is possible, that we can do this, and that women are stronger to do this.

One of the best career advice I ever received was to stop waiting until you feel 100% ready. I worked for an all-women engineering firm, and I would doubt myself left and right coming into things. I'd ask for work, overwork, put my head down, and just want to work harder to prove stuff. My boss told me that many talented women spend years trying to earn that confidence before taking the next step - don't ask for what you're supposed to get. Confidence rarely comes first. Action comes first. Some of the biggest opportunities in my career happened because I finally raised my hand before I had every answer. I finally learned I don't have to know everything up front, I just need to be willing to sit back and learn.

It's worth it to sit back and go for it, go with a thousand percent head-on in construction. Don't be scared if it's a male-dominated role - it's really not. I would say to take every opportunity you can and learn the companies and learn the trades, and grow with it. Don't be scared to introduce new solutions. Construction tech is huge, and people are coming in and offering solutions left and right, and it's a great market to get in from the ground up and be able to be a part of it as it builds with AI and everything else that's coming through.

Right now we're in a very weird market where you have every generation in the same office - your Gen Xers, your Millennials, your Gen Zs, from C-suite level down to interns. One of the biggest struggles I find today is making sure that people who are older come in and understand the technology and why it's important. Construction is really hard - even the biggest GCs in the world, it's still an old boy system. They are very much friendly with subs, they know their subs and who they're going to deal with. So one of the biggest challenges I face is the educational part of this - selling and not pitching, making sure that they understand what's important and how much AI is going to impact them as a team member, but not replace what they're currently doing. I'm trying to educate every GC on this new technology. It will shift in a couple years based on the market - eventually it's going to be me as a millennial coming in, and we grew up with technology so we understand it. You're going to have a lot of those older folks move out of the C-suites, which will make it a little bit easier, but we also want to be in the door before that happens because there's so many companies right now that are popping up everywhere with the same type of technology. So it's going against all these generational mindsets and really just going at it head hard, teaching them and making sure that they know it's important.

Right now my values are working with the culture that I have at Drone Brothers - being able to be family first, being able to raise my family but also have a career and have somebody that's open to know that, yes, unfortunately, I do have to take some sick days here and there with kids, but it doesn't stop me from moving forward. The culture is a big part of it - having an employer who understands that family comes first while still valuing my professional contributions.