Skender is a Chicago general contractor and construction manager founded in 1955, working across multifamily, commercial, healthcare, and interiors. The firm recently topped out 370 N. Morgan Street, a 32-story rental tower in the city’s Fulton Market neighborhood. Skender self-performs on many projects and has pushed hard on technology and prefabrication to compress schedules. It builds mostly across the Chicago area, where a long track record in dense, logistically tight urban sites has made it a go-to for high-rise residential work.
Two offices, not one. Skender runs its Chicago headquarters (312.781.0265) alongside an Indianapolis office (317.669.6692) opened after the firm began work in Indiana in early 2020. Indiana work since then has covered healthcare, retail, office and municipal projects totalling well over one million square feet across the state, led by Brian Simons as President, Indiana.
The company puts its headcount at nearly 400 people. Leadership is long-tenured rather than recently assembled: CEO Jerry Ball joined in 2003 as CFO, President Andy Halik in 2011, COO Brian Bukowski in 2007, Chief People Officer Lisa Latronico in 2001, and CFO Stacy Laughlin in 2012.
A self-perform and construction technology group sits inside the company under Senior Vice President Clay Edwards. It covers general labor, demolition and carpentry on the trade side, and BIM, 3D laser scanning, high-definition surveying, intelligent project tracking, drone mapping and immersive reality on the technology side – capabilities an owner would otherwise have to source from separate specialty vendors.
Lean is the organizing idea. Skender describes it as process thinking rooted in continuous improvement, targeting waste in the form of excess materials, delays and underused resources, with the stated aim of improving efficiency, sustainability and ROI while reducing risk and speeding time to market. Afshan Barshan, a founding member and past chair of the Lean Construction Institute’s Chicago Community of Practice, helped develop the firm’s Lean delivery processes and teaches Lean construction as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University.
Market coverage is wider than the headline sectors suggest. Skender lists affordable housing, healthcare, higher education, hospitality, industrial, interiors, K-12 education, life sciences, mission critical, multifamily, municipal, office, retail, senior living, and sports and recreation. Mission critical is an active push – the firm brought on a Director of Data Center Accounts to expand its data center and always-on facility footprint.
Preconstruction is treated as its own discipline under a dedicated Preconstruction Executive, Ryan Cotter, covering estimating and early collaboration with developers, architects, engineers and trade partners. Named interiors clients on the company’s own pages include Google, LinkedIn, PepsiCo, Salesforce, Bank of America, Motorola Mobility, Cars.com, SRAM and Sprout Social. The firm states values of Proactive, Refreshing and True Partner, and points to workplace recognition as a recruiting and retention advantage.
