(bright gentle music) - I'm Norm Silverstein.

Glad you're with us.

We're in good company today with Tom Judson, chairman and CEO of The Pike Company.

It's not a cliche to say that Tom and his family helped build Rochester from the ground up.

In fact, the company's timeline goes back more than a century.

John B. Pike & Son built Rochester Savings Bank in 1927 and, a few years later, Rochester's first medical arts building.

Tom's family, Tom, and now his son Rufus have led and innovated in the contracting and building industries.

Under Tom's leadership, The Pike Company has shaped, constructed, and reimagined thousands of buildings in Rochester and across the country.

Tom and his wife Ebets are well-known community supporters and advocates for a vibrant Rochester.

Tom, I'm so glad you could be with us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Tom, I'm sure that our viewers have passed many signs in this entire community that say Pike Construction, Pike Company, but they don't know what's going on behind those signs.

So why don't we start off by telling us a little bit about The Pike Company?

- Well, we're a general contractor based here in Rochester.

We take responsibility for the overall project, and it can be in the building types that you've described.

We also do work in other areas, from road work to bridges, but our responsibility is to be the prime contractor in connection with our clients, and then we subcontract a big part of each project, depending on what the requirements are.

- Well, your company's been involved in so many projects, including the renovation of the Eastman Theatre.

That was something we documented on public television.

Is there one project that stands out as being your favorite or the most important to The Pike Company?

- Well, there are a lot of projects.

It's hard to say which is my favorite.

I would say though, that the Eastman Kodak Hall project stands high on the list and especially the building that went into what was called the parking lot that Mr. Eastman wouldn't buy because he didn't think the pricing was reasonable.

But when we think of the program that's in there in terms of the recital hall, the practice hall, it's just extraordinary, and it was a very complex structure.

So I love that one.

I love the archives of the George Eastman house.

That was very important to us at that time and the program that it allowed in terms of keeping the collection here in Rochester, but there's so many, it's hard to say any one in particular.

- Well, I understand you also worked on Epcot Center.

So does that give you a lifetime pass to Disney World?

- Well, it was a wonderful and exciting project.

We did the World of Motion and the World of Energy back in the early 80s, and that was very exciting, when it started as just a green field, and we were actually one of the first contracts after they did the infrastructure, so that was an exciting project.

- Well, here in Rochester, we've talked about a couple of your projects, the Rochester Savings Bank, Eastman.

Your company also worked on the Granite building, the Rochester Museum & Science Center, and Woodcliff.

How do you feel when you drive by some of these buildings that Pike was so involved with?

- Well, I'm very proud of them, and, of course, I grew up in this world with my grandfather and my father.

I can remember when we were selected to do Midtown Plaza.

That was a pretty exciting event for our family, and, of course, it was also the same year we did the Finger Lakes Racetrack, so we were very busy that year, and that was great.

But it's always been a huge component of just my existence as far as looking at projects, being aware of them, competing for them, the excitement of winning them, the disappointment of not winning them, all of that.

- Oh, okay.

Disappointment.

Was there one big project that you wish you had?

- Oh, sure, there are tons of them, but I think in our business, you have to look at those things that you win and then be thankful for that, and the things that you don't, you have to move on and really focus on those projects you have a chance to do.

So I don't allow myself to do that too much, and I think it's the right way to look at things.

- We talked about your company being around for more than a century.

In fact, when was it founded, 1873?

- It was founded by my great-grandfather, John B. Pike, who was born in Holland and came over shortly after the Civil War, and he started it as a millwork company.

And so we were doing the interiors of a lot of the, you know, very intricate homes along East Avenue and other places, and then his son, my grandfather, John D. Pike, who was born in 1884, he decided he wanted to be a general contractor, and that's when it became John B. Pike & Son.

And he was the one who brought us to where we are today as a significant general contractor, not just doing the woodworking component of projects.

- So your roots as a company go back 130 years.

Am I correct?

- That's right.

- But your headquarters is still at One Circle Street in Rochester, not too far from the public market.

So with all the opportunities you must have had over the years, what's kept you in Rochester?

- Well, I think Rochester's an incredible place to live.

Both sides of my family have been here for a long time.

The Judsons on my father's side were here back in the 1850s.

So it's been a part of my life, my wife Ebets grew up here, and it's never occurred to us to wanna move anywhere else.

I mean, we've wanted to be here, and we've made our life here in terms of our business and in terms of engaging with the community.

- You grew up close to your grandfather's house, is that correct?

- Well, until I was 10 years old, we lived on, actually, half of our garage was in Brighton, and our house was in Rochester, and we were on Highland Avenue near St. Thomas Episcopal Church, and going into Rochester my Grandfather Judson lived, and going the other direction my Grandfather Pike, and we could get to each of them on our bicycles.

- Wow.

- So that was fun.

- Was that in the Brighton area and then back into the city?

- Well, my grandfather Judson lived on Highland Heights, which is off of Highland, and my grandfather Pike lived on Grover, which is also off of Highland.

- What was it like back then?

What was the neighborhood like, and how's it changed over these years?

- Well, it was wonderful.

In fact, the subway was still running.

I would take the subway downtown with my parents, where the Interstate 390 is, so that was fun, and we had a great neighborhood.

There were new houses being built in the neighborhood.

So it was great.

I went to Brighton Grammar School.

Could ride my bike down there, and it was a great place to be.

- Well, tell us a little more about Tom Judson.

I understand that you knew you wanted to be in this business even before you finished college, and you came back and got involved.

So what was it about contracting and building things that, really, you knew this was in your blood?

- It's true, I really did know, and, you know, that's a good question of what was it that made me wanna do it?

I think the things that you've just described is, you know, the pride of the buildings that we had a chance to build and the clients that we had and being very proud of my Grandfather Pike and my father, and it is interesting 'cause I've never gotten a paycheck from anybody but Pike, other than my active duty in the National Guard and Reserves.

So you could argue I'm fairly dull.

And if you allow me to count it, in 1963, when I was in college working out at RIT in the summer, that's when I started, which is just summer employment, but that's over 50 years ago, which is hard to believe.

In the summers, I would work out on the projects, and then I had a chance to be for a year out at what was called Riverwood, Kodak's Marketing Education Center that we were building in the late 60s, early 70s, and was designed by Skidmore, Ownings, and Merrill, and it was in the successful days of Kodak.

So it was a very exciting project for us and very interesting building.

Yes, and I was there over a year as I was actually waiting to go active duty for the National Guard.

I originally scheduled to be at Cornell for the last year of my MBA at the Cornell Business School down there, but I lost my deferment just before Ebets and I were married in 1968.

And so I got into a National Guard unit and got a chance to work for the company in the field for a year before going on active duty.

- And Cornell's actually one of the places where you've done some work, isn't it?

- Oh yeah.

We have been very happy to be able to do work down there.

We're currently doing Stocking Hall, and we've done Mann Library and a whole variety of projects down there.

- You know, companies that are around 40 or 50 years, that's sometimes considered a pretty long life for a company.

We're talking about a company that's been around for over a century.

So was there some magic to this, or is it the word family that comes back that is responsible for your still being here?

- Well, it's a good question.

I think, you know, we have good times, and we have times that aren't quite so good, but we've gone through cycles, but for the last 25, 30 years, it's been very good.

I had a chance to become engaged in the company, and it's been my life outside my family, and, of course, it's part of my family now with my son and my son-in-law, who's one of our executive vice presidents in the company.

I don't know that it's intentional to say we're going to go on in the family all these years.

I have to say, I told Rufus, "Please don't you dare do this for me.

It's a great opportunity.

I would be thrilled if you did, but there is no obligation because, you know, you only get one life.

You've gotta decide what you wanna do," and fortunately, he did wanna do it, and finally, he told me to shut up.

"I wanna do it."

(laughs) So I'm thrilled.

And he's doing an incredible job.

It's really wonderful.

- You know, you focused a lot on education.

You built schools.

You build colleges.

What are some of the big projects that our viewers might recognize?

- Well, we've done quite a bit of work out at RIT, Global Village, the Gordon Field House, the Golisano School of Computer Science.

We did the renovation of the dorms at the University of Rochester, the Wilmont Cancer Center.

You've already described the Eastman, the Kodak Hall Eastman Theatre.

So we've done a lot of that.

We've worked at Hobart.

I mean, we work at a lot of colleges.

We worked in New Haven at Yale, at my alma mater, and so we're very intentional about that.

We pursue that work, a lot of healthcare, a lot of different things.

I mean, we're based here.

We operate throughout the Northeast, and we travel.

We'll travel anywhere for our customers.

We just did a project out in Montana for Delaware North, which was fun, at Yellowstone.

- Oh, that sounds great.

- Yellowstone, yeah.

- You know, when I go to your website, I see some interesting things about integrity and how the last 5% of a project is as important as the first 95%.

Elaborate on that for me.

- I mean, I think all of us in our business are excited about the chase and winning the project, and we get to 95%, and our attention goes to the next project.

So we have to be very intentional about finishing what we have and making sure that we complete our responsibilities to our clients and to the whole project.

So we work very hard on that because it isn't human nature to actually wanna do that.

You really want to go to the next project 'cause you basically, at that point, the client generally is in the building, is using it.

It's a matter of completing all the various components of the contract and the as-built drawings and all of that sort of stuff.

So we work hard on that because it requires real attention to do it well.

- These sound like values that might've been passed down in your family.

Are these things you learned from your grandfather and your father?

- I think it's a combination of experience, just what you described, my father, my grandfather, mistakes that we've made where we see issues and we realize when you look back and how would we have done it differently.

So we then try and be very intentional about those things that we wanna keep reminding ourselves of.

- And was your mother a strong influence on you also?

- Oh my goodness, yes.

She was very strong, and at a different time, I mean, she was incredibly active in the community.

I think generally, every organization she became part of, she would became head of.

I mean, I think in today's time, she'd probably be running the company.

(laughs) She was very, very capable, wonderful mother.

I couldn't ask for any more.

- Well, your wife Ebets has also been, I know, a strong influence.

There are a lot of things you together decide to devote your time and your resources to.

- We always were very clear that we were gonna each have our own interests, and her life has been at the Allendale Columbia School where she spent 30 years.

She went there 12 years before, and now she's back and gone back, and she left and came on the board, became chairman of the board.

They've asked her to come back, and we have three grandsons there now.

So it's wonderful as we go through life.

But that's an important part of her interest, and she's on a lot of different boards.

She's been chair of the Registered Public Library.

She's very, very interested right now in Ganondagan, which is out where we live in Victor, which is for the Seneca Nation.

- You live not too far from Ganondagan.

Is that part of your interest, or is it something that you feel is important for this region to have a strong remembrance of the Native American influence?

- Well, I think both.

I mean, you asked two questions, and I would say yes to both of them.

Again, we're kind of dull.

We moved to Victor in 1970 and bought 100 acres.

We lived in a small tenant farmhouse, and then in '75, we built a house in the back of the property.

We've added to what we bought originally.

So we've got a couple hundred acres now, and our house is right in the middle of it.

We're half a mile to our mailbox, but anyway, it's a wonderful way of life living in this part of the world where we can live there and have a life as we do in this community.

Ganondagan is right around the corner.

Where we live is where the Seneca's home was and where they grew crops, where they hunted.

So that's absolutely part of it.

It's been part of it ever since we first moved out there, for her especially.

- Giving back is something that you and Ebets both believe in.

What inspires you to do so much to try to work to improve the quality of life in the community?

- I think probably we both grew up in that tradition with the example of our parents, her family and mine, but I think of what we're given in this community, and especially some of the greats, the perhaps the greatest, obviously the greatest impact way back, Mr. Eastman, and the things that he created, George Eastman in terms of the United Way, the Chamber of Commerce, the Eastman Theatre, and I think there's an obligation for us that are in circumstances where we can give back that we give our time and effort to continue these wonderful things that we have here in Rochester.

- Tom, you had a lot of successes over the years.

You also had a tough time in the mid 80s where you had to really dissolve, I guess that would be the first company and then reformed as The Pike Company.

How did you get through that?

What was it like having to take that drastic an action?

- Well, actually, when we got into those circumstances, to suggest that I was in control in any way would be not accurate or made decisions.

The old company, John B. Pike & Son, we had a major project in the Albany area, and we had a couple of others where we basically depleted our resources, and we had to get the support of our surety to complete the project, so it was terrible.

I mean, it was more than 100 years from the founding.

I was president.

I became president in 1975 when I was 30.

So it was just a horrible time, and fortunately, our surety decided to fund the company, retain us to complete the projects that needed to be completed, and then after we got it under control, they were willing to allow me to start a new company and give me surety credit, which was something that was extraordinary.

But that's not something I ever could say that I planned or that I did.

It just was a sequence of events that occurred.

And basically, so in 1987, we were a new small company, The Pike Company, which basically was starting over again, frankly, and here we are.

It's amazing.

- And has come a long way since then.

How many employees do you have now, and how big a company is The Pike Company?

- Well, the number of employees between ourselves and LeCesse, who we have merged with, is approaching 600.

The revenue that we had this last year was approaching 500 million, and if you take the value of the work that we manage where we do just program management, where we don't hold the contracts, last year, we did just under a billion dollars worth of work.

- I guess you say that's not too bad for a family business.

- It's unbelievable.

It's all Rufus.

- (laughs) Well, you've diversified a lot over the years in types of projects that you take on.

What do you see for the future?

What's your vision for Pike going forward?

- It's amazing, it took me so long, but when we thought about what's our brand, we concluded probably 10 years ago, it's our people, and it's the people and the experience that we give our customers.

We have to give them the best quality, we have to give them a good price, and we have to do it in a timely fashion, and hopefully all of those things better than our competitors, but if there's not a better, if we don't help our clients be successful.

So we look at being in that position with our customers.

Our vision statement is to become the contractor of choice by delighting our customers and assuring their success every time, and the every time is that consistency thing, which goes actually back to the last 5% that we just talked about.

So the vision is built on those kinds of opportunities and those kinds of relationships that we can have with, we hope, the best customers.

- What are some of the major projects in the area that you're involved in right now, things that our viewers might take a look at and say, "Well, now I know who's doing that work"?

- Well, in Rochester, I guess it would be the Transit Center, College Town.

We're doing the hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel for the DelMonte.

We're doing the parking garage and the office buildings there.

Soon, I start breaking ground for Gannett at the corner of Clinton and Main.

- That's part of the Midtown - Which is part - revitalization.

- of the Windstream, which is an addition to the Windstream building, which we've already done for Windstream.

We're involved with seven projects for the Rochester City schools, and four of them as a construction manager and three as a general contractor.

- Are these new school buildings or administrative?

- They're basically renovations of existing schools.

- Renovations.

Let's talk again about that big renovation you were involved in not that long ago at the Eastman Theatre.

There's certainly a lot of public attention on that.

Did that make that project a little different, the press coming over, the scrutiny of everything that was going on?

- You know, it was fun, actually, I mean, because it was so complex, we had such a wonderful client, a great design team, and it was different components.

The first phase was bringing the mechanical systems up to standard, and then the next phase, which was not the new construction, was that very small window of time when we were to take out all the seats and do all the work in the theater, and we did about 12, $13 million worth of work in about three months.

Now the only way you can do that is you've gotta have everything there ready to go.

You can't be waiting on deliveries for everything.

- I remember you mentioned the taking out of the seats from the old theater, and the late Dean Doug Lowry said he walked in the next day and looked around and said, "Oh my God, what have we done?

- I know, exactly.

- So that must've been a little bit of handholding to make sure that our friends at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School knew that they were gonna get a great facility.

- [Tom] Yeah, and they were a wonderful client.

They were there with us at every decision point, and that's when we had the most fun and the most successful projects where we really engage our clients in the whole process.

- We've talked a lot about Rochester.

Your roots here go back many generations as a family, but if there's one thing you could change about Rochester, what do you think it would be?

- Well, the obvious one, of course, that we all complain about in upstate on shackles, I wish we had a better tax climate in terms of, you know, attracting and retaining and having private sector jobs, and that would be great.

But I think that it's funny because I live out in the country, but I'm really concerned that we do need to create a vibrant downtown, and I think what some of these projects that are underway in terms of bringing people living, what Bob Morgan and Larry Glazer are gonna do at Midtown, I think is fabulous and bringing people, get a grocery store, that type of thing.

So I think that's really important because we're at a turning point, and that's a point of great opportunity.

I think another horrible problem that we have is the poverty we have in the inner city and how to turn that cycle to give the chance to those people to get into the mainstream of the American dream.

I don't pretend to know exactly how to do it, but that would be something I'd love to change.

- What about Rochester's best kept secret?

What might that be?

- Well, I think that, first of all, the fact that we can live in a life, we have the tradition of what we have in Rochester with the arts, with the universities, and yet we can live, as an example for us, way out where our mailbox is a half a mile from the house and yet come and be part of this every day.

I think our people, I think our academic institutions, and I think the quality of our workforce is extraordinary, and I like the Four Seasons.

I mean, I have to admit, and I wish Ebets would be more interested 'cause she likes staying here more than I do, but I would go away a little bit in the winter, but I think it's wonderful here, and I think our lifestyle is wonderful.

- Well, you just described a number of things.

Maybe this is redundant, but what do you love most about the Rochester area?

- Well, just that.

I mean, I think if we travel around and we say we're from Rochester, New York, people from other areas, they think of New York City, which is wonderful unto itself, but we're very different from that, and I think that's a good thing.

I like what we are.

I must say I love where our office is right now with Village Gate and all the excitement that's happening down there over on Circle Street, so come on down and see what's going on there.

- That whole neighborhood really is changing.

It's driven by the arts.

- Well, exactly, and I think that with the sculpture garden, with the art gallery there, with Village Gate, with Art Walk, I mean, I'm just delighted where we are, and I don't wanna go anywhere else.

I think everything somehow is coming to us.

It's fabulous, and it is a great part of town.

- So you've got a son involved in the business, a son-in-law involved in the business.

Do you see any grandchildren who might eventually be running this?

What do you think, looking further out, the company's going to look like?

Is it gonna still be The Pike Company and the Pike family?

- I think so, but, I mean, I think those decisions will pass to Rufus and our son-in-Law, Mauricio, and our daughter and Rufus's wife Amy.

I'm having fun at this stage and doing the things I'm doing with them.

Our son-in-law is wonderful.

Our daughter met Mauricio in Bolivia when she was in the Peace Corps, and he's just done an extraordinary job for us.

I think that we wanna continue to do what we're doing and be successful as far as make providing great results for our customers and a great life for our people, and it seems to all just happen.

As long as you do those things, as long as you do those basic things that good things happen.

- Sounds like you're having a good time.

- I am, I really am, and I'm at a stage where I've got the support with Rufus and Mauricio and our team.

We have a wonderful CFO, Bill Tehan, that there are a lot of wonderful options, a lot of happy choices, if you will, for us.

- Tom, you and your company, your family, they've had a big positive influence on this community, and we appreciate your sharing your story with us today.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for watching.

You can share this program or watch it online at wxxi.org, and we'll see you next time on "Norm & Company."

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