Casey Baldovin

Owner

Baldovin Construction

Peoria, Ill.

Projected 2023 Revenue: $20 million

On processes and efficiency: When I was probably 20 years old, I started building large commercial buildings, learning the ins and outs of large-scale construction and phased planning, accelerated timelines, and schedules. It taught me a lot of what residential construction hadn’t shown me up until that point.

I took a lot of the things I learned between both residential and commercial to try and make a company geared after both. The templates I’ve built off of are systems that come from the commercial industry. We have to build robust planning systems: scheduling software, estimating systems, how we structure our phases.

Leadership and team philosophy: We have field training that goes into everything we do or touch as a general contractor, but we do a lot of emotional communication training as well as leadership training. Anybody that’s moving up in the company, both in office and field, receive leadership training and robust communication training that we call emotional training, it’s like mental health training.

If you’re having a tough time in your life, job, or whatever it may be, it covers how you can work through those as a team. The better they feel mentally and emotionally and can communicate and feel heard, the better everyone is. At the end of the day, you spend a lot of time at work. I don’t want it to feel like a job, I want this to feel like you have family here, and it’s more than just numbers.

Book recommendation: Extreme Ownership

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