The window in Brad Dimeo’s office provides a sweeping view of his company’s work over the last 80 years. In the distance, the roof of the List Art Center at Brown University in Providence pokes above the skyline. The sun glistens off the new Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island headquarters downtown and somewhere below the rooftops nearby is the Dunkin’ Donuts Center.
They are just three of the dozens of buildings constructed by Dimeo Construction Co. since Dimeo’s grandfather started it with little more than a small office and a handful of laborers eight decades ago.
Today, Brad Dimeo serves as president of the regional construction-industry giant that survived the Great Depression, multiple economic downturns and is now fighting its way through the Great Recession. And unlike so many family businesses, the company has been handed down through three generations with little incident and its current president sees it remaining a family company for decades to come.
“It’s something that most of us have grown up with,” Dimeo, 48, said of the business. “We know it. We love it. We’re passionate about it.”
Before Dimeo took the company reins in 1999, his father, Thomas, ran the shop. Before that it was the duo of his father and his uncle Joseph, who took over from his grandfather, also named Joseph. The Italian immigrant had arrived in the United States as an infant in 1894 with a struggling family in search of the American dream.
At the age of 37, the eldest Dimeo set up shop on West Exchange Street between a plumber and a mason, after his masonry business succumbed to the economy. The new company at the foot of Federal Hill took on a diverse array of projects, including building small homes and manufacturing facilities and bunkers for the U.S. Coast Guard. Records show the budding businessman grossed about $140,000 annually in his early years, compared with the hundreds of millions the company grosses today. In 1961, he purchased a plot of land off Allens Avenue in Providence where his two sons later built the current headquarters.
“He definitely had a vision to grow and prosper and develop a great life for his family,” Brad Dimeo said.
Along the way, Dimeo branched out from Rhode Island, partly from a desire to grow and partly from economic necessity. The company opened regional offices in Boston and New Haven, Conn. during the 1980s and expanded from a general contractor to a full-fledged construction-management firm.
“It seems like every time we get slow [in R.I.] we kind of gravitate toward growing our geographic market a little,” Dimeo said.
The market today is especially tough. Dimeo said he feared that the economic crash in the fall of 2008 would lead to a complete stop for the construction industry. That didn’t quite happen, though Dimeo said revenue has tumbled from about $567 million a year to about $325 million annually. Work also slowed, but governments and schools kept building and Dimeo kept looking out of state. The company recently received a big boost when the Gateway Community College gave the company a go-ahead to build a new $140 million campus in New Haven.
And Dimeo said seeing the economic dips of previous decades – especially the one in the late 1980s and early 1990s – created a thick skin that helped him weather the latest economic storm. It is experience that he began gaining early in his life.
As a child Brad and his siblings would tag along on weekends with their father as he inspected job sites. A young Brad took great joy in etching his name in concrete that had not yet cured, though his father was careful to allow the activity only on concrete that workers would later cover. Years later Brad Dimeo would serve as a field engineer and assistant project manager.
But Dimeo soon discovered crewing was not going to pay the bills and came to work for the family business full time in the fall of 1985. He climbed the management rungs before his father started passing the baton to him in the 1990s.
His father, now 79, is enjoying retirement, but maintains an office two doors down from his son and stops in occasionally to check up on the place. Up until a few years ago, he reviewed the quarterly statements, in what could be described as an informal audit but with all the same pressure. As Brad Dimeo tells it, his father would, occasionally, provide a forceful push to the new management crew to do better.
But as his son and his team found their footing, the elder Dimeo stepped back.
“He’s been great because he’s really let it go to the next generation,” Brad Dimeo said. “There are a lot of people from that generation and that ilk that really want to micromanage.”
The elder Dimeo also handed off a sister company, Dimeo Properties in Warwick, to his other son, Paul. Both could also pass to yet another generation. Brad Dimeo has a number of nieces and nephews as well as a 10-year-old daughter, Blakely. She already considers one of the offices at Dimeo Construction her own, despite her full-time job as an elementary school student. Like her father, she is fascinated with the operations of the company and the ability to turn lines on paper into buildings where people live and work.
For Brad Dimeo, working with a team that turns those lines into structures and seeing them outside his window keeps him coming to work every day.
“The business is very rewarding because at the end of the day you see something and it’s very real when you come right down to it,” Dimeo said, as the sun set over Providence and the buildings his company built. •
