Lauren Harmon-Morley

I definitely would say my parents are probably a big part of it. Both of my parents are very tenacious, hard-working people. I was raised in a business-oriented environment - we didn't talk about sports at the dinner table, we didn't talk about friends, my parents usually talked business. I went to events with them and grew up in that world. I learned how to run a business at the dinner table. I'm also just very stubborn, or tenacity is probably a better word for it, because I don't really take the word no very well. I'm someone who has been through a lot, both in my company and in my personal life, and I'm just someone who always really tries to focus on not why is this happening to me, but how can I get to a better place. I'm very much a glass-half-full kind of person, and if you're not optimistic, nobody else is gonna be optimistic. In construction, things are gonna go wrong and go sideways, and if all you do is look at the problem and don't focus on what the solution's gonna be, you're not gonna survive.

The best career advice I received came from a session called Upstanding at a National Women in Roofing event. The key lesson was understanding that not everyone is necessarily the enemy, and that whether it's men or women, you're gonna have people who are gonna support you and people who aren't gonna support you. Learning how to vet those people and gut-check them so that you're surrounding yourself by people who want to support you was one of the biggest things for me. Being a woman in construction, it was really easy to immediately be defensive with men and think that they were trying to talk down to you, or always assume that a woman was on your side. Sometimes that just wasn't the case. Sometimes men upstood for me more than women, and sometimes women didn't have my back. I needed to basically take my psych degree and learn how to find the people I could trust the most to surround myself with and find help with.

I have two pieces of advice. First, get to know yourself and trust that that's the person that you want to be. When I first stepped into leadership, I felt like if I led the way that was my most natural instinct, people wouldn't take me seriously. My staff called me the Ice Queen for a couple of years because I was every bit of an authoritarian leader, and I was miserable because I wasn't myself 85% of the time. Eventually I learned to be who you are and lead the way you want to lead, and you'll be happier. If there's people there who don't respect you, then there are people that you don't need to be working with anyways. Learn how to be your most authentic self. My second piece of advice is about dealing with men in male-dominated industries. There are basically three types of men: those who naturally understand how to support women, those who just don't get it and will always be disrespectful, and then there's this really big middle sector of 50-60% of men who are good people who just haven't been around women all that much and might say stupid things sometimes. Instead of taking that and assuming the worst, use that time to educate them. Lead with education and lead with empathy - it's often going to get you a lot farther than being confrontational.

Right now, the market on the roofing side of things is very challenging. Construction overall across the country is down pretty significantly, and a lot of people just aren't spending money. In our market in particular, weather is not participating - we had a very dry winter, and people don't need roofs when their roofs aren't leaking. Where I've been very lucky is we're very diversified. We have a general envelope company that's been around a lot longer than my roofing side, and a lot of roofers are trying to jump into these other trades that we've been doing for 25 years. That has been a huge blessing this year because a lot of people are laying people off, and I'm not. I have a very strong team, which is really nice. On the opportunity side, being a woman in construction is no longer a challenge - it's 100% an opportunity. There are a lot of people who give extra points for it. A lot of municipalities will only award contracts to minority-owned businesses. We have woman-owned on every single piece of marketing that gets put out. Five years ago, I would have said maybe there's benefits to being a woman, but they don't outweigh how difficult it is. Today, I would 100% say the benefits of being a woman outweigh the difficulty in construction now.

Trust is a really big one for me. I think that it's something that there's not enough of in relationships, and I think there's not enough of it in the construction world. Trust and transparency are something that I try to really strive for. I try to be very transparent with my employees, and I try to make sure that if they tell me things, those things stay with me. I'm the same way with my clients - I think I have a lot of clients who are return clients because they just know that I'm gonna shoot it straight with them. Optimism is another core value. I'm very much a glass-half-full kind of person. I always struggled with feeling like if I was overly optimistic, people wouldn't take me seriously, so I would sometimes try to shade that part of myself. But at the end of the day, I've learned that if you're not optimistic, nobody else is gonna be optimistic. In construction, things are gonna go wrong and go sideways, and if all you do is look at the problem and don't focus on what the solution's gonna be, you're not gonna survive.