Rebecca Smith drew the attention of workers as she walked through a construction site 20 years ago. What is a woman doing on a building site? She owned the company, of course. She still does, reports FloridaToday.com.
Smith has seen the company hit a high point of $80 million in annual revenue and a staff of about 50. Today, the company makes less than half that, about $30 million, and has a staff in the mid-thirties.
But the downturn hasn’t diminished the drive Smith had when she started her company more than 20 years ago out of her home in Tampa with a $10,000 loan from her father.
“I wanted to be a contractor,” Smith said. “The fact that everybody else was going out of business didn’t matter. If there was one contract let, I was going to get it.”
Women have made big strides owning and running businesses. Finding them in construction, however, remains rare: Women occupied about 9 percent of jobs in the field in 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That has made Smith something of a role model, both for being in a non-traditional field and fighting the stereotypes that come with that position.
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