Why Relationships, Not Low Bids, Built This Construction Company, feat. MCL Construction | S1E9
In this episode of Builders, Makers, Doers, Andy and Elliot sit down with Tony Fucinaro, Managing Principal at MCL Construction, for a grounded conversation about what actually sustains a construction company as it grows.
Tony didn’t come up through a traditional construction path.
He started in the restaurant industry. High pressure. Tight margins. Real people problems.
That background shaped how he thinks about leadership, relationships, and decision-making under stress and why MCL chose a different path as it scaled from a small firm to nearly 300 employees.
This is not a project management episode.
It’s a leadership and ownership episode.
For construction, manufacturing, and specialty trades owners, this conversation goes deeper than job sites and schedules.
It’s about:
• Why relationship-first leadership outlasts low-bid thinking
• How critical thinking prevents small problems from becoming existential ones
• Why scaling gets harder when people become the real constraint
• The difference between authority and responsibility in leadership
• What owners must change as the business grows beyond them
Tony shares real lessons from decades inside MCL, including moments when the old way of doing construction simply stopped working and what had to change to protect the team, the culture, and the future of the business.
This episode explores:
1. Why most construction problems are thinking problems, not technical ones
2. How slowing down early creates speed later
3. Why leadership failures often show up as labor burnout
4. How owners quietly become the bottleneck without realizing it
5. What it really means to build a company that lasts beyond one generation
This episode isn’t about buildings.
It’s about building a business that can survive pressure, complexity, and time.
If you own or plan to own a trades business, this conversation will hit close to home.
Chapters
00:00 – Why leadership pressure breaks construction companies04:05 – How restaurant work prepared Tony for construction
07:10 – Why relationships matter more than low bids
09:25 – Most jobsite problems are thinking problems
14:30 – Slowing down early to avoid chaos later
22:30 – Scaling is hard because it’s all people
25:10 – Authority vs responsibility in leadership
39:10 – What owners are really leaving behind
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