Donley's Inc.

Donley’s is an employee-owned concrete and construction management firm founded in Cleveland in 1941 as Ernest F. Donley’s Sons and renamed Donley’s in 1969. Self-performed concrete is the core of the business, which puts the firm in an unusual position on projects where structure drives the schedule: it holds both the means and the sequence rather than coordinating them across a subcontract. The company also works as a construction manager and delivers work through design-build, design-assist and integrated project delivery, with dedicated practices in parking structures and concrete restoration. It operates from Cleveland with offices in Richmond, Virginia, Apex, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina. Donley’s Next Generation Construction is part of the CLE Connection Group design-build team at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

The lineage runs further back than the 1941 date on the corporate record. James and George Donley formed a lathing partnership in Cleveland in 1895 called Donley Brothers Company. In 1941, Don and Phil Donley bought the construction department out of that business and set up as concrete formwork contractors. Terry Donley took over as third-generation president and CEO in 1968, handed off to his son Mac in 2002, and Mac led the company until 2024 before moving to Chairman.

Ownership changed shape in 2023. After four generations in the family, Donley’s converted to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Shares are distributed to employees at no cost, on top of a 401(k), so ownership is earned by working there rather than bought into.

Owning the formwork rather than renting it changes what the schedule can absorb. On Morrison Yard Apartments in Charleston, the crew mobilised and started forming inside three weeks, and placed 17,755 cubic yards of concrete across a ten-storey cast-in-place frame and a two-story podium deck. Water and wastewater work is a quieter specialty: the Sam’s Branch Water Reclamation Facility in Clayton, North Carolina, is a six-million-gallon-per-day plant with bioreactors, pump stations and aeration basins, all of it concrete-driven.

One client testimonial credits the team with running drone survey for QA/QC on sleeve placements before slabs were poured, catching coordination errors while they were still cheap to fix.

Safety runs under a program the company calls SAFE-D, built around a daily objective of operating incident free rather than an annual target. Offices are in Cleveland, Richmond, Apex and Charleston, with active projects in more than seven states.