Neighborhood Outreach
Groom Construction builds relationships across the country and right in its own backyard.
By Calvin Hennick
Several years ago, a caravan of 22 tractor-trailers pulled up at the Salem headquarters of Groom Construction. At the time, the firm was steeped in prestigious projects, including Tedesco Country Club and Warwick Place, both in Marblehead.
But the trucks didn’t contain granite or marble or crown molding. They were filled with box after box of six-foot-long hinges, which Groom Construction’s workers around the country would spend the next several months installing in fitting rooms at more than 1,000 different Target stores.
David Groom, co-founder and principal at the firm, had to chuckle at the size of the delivery and its timing, which together perfectly illustrated how the company had grown from humble beginnings to tackle a lucrative mix of glamour gigs and behind-the-scenes grunt work. “On the one hand, we were doing some of the truly landmark buildings, and we prided ourselves on building these really beautiful homes,” Groom says. “We were thinking we were the cat’s meow. But on flip side, some of the stuff we were doing was small projects on a very large scale.”
Groom, 57, never expected to be in the construction business back when he was a history major at UMass Amherst. But during college, he painted houses with his older brother, Tom, who attended Wentworth Institute of Technology. The two continued working together after they graduated, tacking projects like roofing and siding. “I joked that I couldn’t find any signs saying, ‘History Majors Wanted,’” Groom recalls.
The company began its transformation into a true construction firm when it built its first home in Marblehead in the mid-1980s, a decade that also saw the addition of younger brother Dwight Groom and longtime friend Scott Faulkner as partners. Over time, the company jettisoned lower-profit aspects of the business while taking on a variety of projects that contributed to the firm’s current diversified model. “We turned a corner in probably the mid-1990s, where we started to do commercial construction,” Groom says. “We started out by doing a good amount of municipal work, and that really helped us cut our teeth. We got rid of our roofing business and our painting business and our home improvement business altogether, and focused more on pure construction.”
Today, Groom Construction employs 200 people and is nearing $100 million an annual revenues, with a résumé that includes projects ranging from a 90,000-square-foot YMCA in Marblehead to a BJ’s Wholesale Club in Seekonk to 12 luxury condominiums in Boston’s South End. “It feels like a good business plan,” Groom says. “We’ve found that some parts of our business are always strong, when other parts can be soft. We’ve watched big companies disappear off the face of the map, but we’ve hung in there because we have a healthy mix of business, a healthy mix of clients, and, honestly, a really, really good staff.”
To build that staff, Groom Construction employs a full-time in-house recruiter, and tries to create a positive work environment. The company encourages employees to make time for their personal lives, gives them unlimited time off when emergencies strike, and has paid to take its entire staff on a three-day trip to Universal Studios in Orlando each of the past two years.
The firm also makes a point of giving back to the communities where it works, with a long list of nonprofit partnerships and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. “We have a hard time saying no,” Groom says. Recently, the company has been particularly involved in organizations that help the homeless, serve people with disabilities, and focus on diabetes research.
Groom credits his father, who owned and operated an office supply company and organized an outreach program for troubled inner-city youth, with setting the example that he and the company follow today. “I think it creates good feelings for our employees, and within our community it creates enormous goodwill,” Groom adds. “You’ve got to give back. I just think that’s why we’re all here.”