Shiel Sexton

Shiel Sexton is an employee-owned general contractor and construction manager founded in 1962 in Indianapolis. The firm builds across healthcare, higher education, corporate, cultural and industrial markets, working mostly in Indiana and the surrounding Midwest, and self-performs concrete and carpentry work on much of its portfolio. Shiel Sexton delivered the renovation of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum that reopened in April 2025, and broke ground in May 2026 on the museum’s 87,000 square foot restoration and event facility at 1111 Polco Street in Speedway, a climate-controlled shop and collection storage building targeted for completion before the 2027 Indianapolis 500. Both projects were designed by Indianapolis-based Schmidt Associates.

Shiel Sexton pairs its Indianapolis roots with a construction-technology stack built around Virtual Design and Construction: building information modeling, 3D trade coordination and clash detection, laser scanning and drone-based reality capture, and time-lapse and 360-degree jobsite documentation. The firm folds these tools into what it calls the Shiel Sexton Standard, a seven-stage delivery process — Analysis, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, Procurement, Construction Services and Post Construction — that carries a project from the first client conversation through warranty work after occupancy.

Higher education is a recurring thread in its portfolio: Shiel Sexton has built for Indiana University, Purdue, Ball State, Butler and the University of Notre Dame, along with an out-of-state project at the University of Louisville. Its industrial work includes a greenfield Tempur Sealy manufacturing plant, and its role on the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team swim trials put the firm on the owner’s side of the table as technical representative rather than as builder.

The company operates as a 100% employee-owned ESOP and frames its work around five guiding principles — Integrity, Satisfaction, Expertise, Relationships and Safety — that show up in day-to-day decisions on cost management, quality control and jobsite risk. Shiel Sexton also runs sister businesses under one roof, including a concrete self-performance operation, an equipment rental arm and a capital management group, letting it self-perform portions of the work it manages rather than subcontracting everything out.

Community involvement is built into the firm’s public communications, from its Beyond the Build volunteer program to recognitions like general counsel Kris Altice’s return to the company’s board and safety leader Adrian Russell’s honors from ENR and ENR Midwest. The firm maintains an active construction blog and, as of mid-2025, a redesigned employee intranet — signals of a regional contractor investing in both its internal systems and its public story as it takes on larger, more technically demanding assignments.