Business View Magazine - July 2023

74 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 7 During all his years on the job, Aukerman says he “really developed a love for construction and for the Griffith Company. I really solved a lot of issues out there in the field and saw how vital it was to give (our teams) a clear path to do their work and to meet our budgets.” His is not a job for the faint of heart, Aukerman added, recalling past projects with the company from years ago. “I’ve always been athletic,” he said. “Growing up, I was a very competitive person, so it really gave me an outlet to utilize all my skills and strengths to estimate projects and the passion to see how I could outsmart our competitors. Along that same time, I was also starting to manage work. We were a much smaller company at that time, so I would bid work and also be a project manager on the jobs that I bid and other jobs that the estimators were bidding. I loved managing projects. I developed a love for the people I was working with and solving problems and issues. So I really just learned that from the ground up as well. “We are a little different from a lot of general GRI FFI TH COMPANY contractors,” Aukerman continued. “We self-perform about 70 percent of our own work, so I had to co-ordinate a lot of the different aspects of what we self-perform. We do earth work and asphalt- paving and landscaping irrigation. We pretty much self-perform everything with the exception of heavy electrical and mechanical. Running a project to me is like running a small business.” He also spoke of the Griffith Company’s operational model. “We’re a large, heavy, civil-infrastructure contractor,” he said. “We’ve been around for a little over 120 years. We’ll be 121 in December. We are set up in regions and divisions, so we are very vertically integrated, and we have offices in Bakersfield, Santa Fe Springs, San Diego and Montclair. Our target market is southern and central California, currently, and that’s where we do all of our work. We are set up in different regions and divisions, so our regions are basically the general contractor arms of the company where we bid the jobs. They’ll take the lead on a bid––a large infrastructure bid. And if we get the job, they’ll also manage the job for the company. Below the regions are divisions, and they basically We are basically in every market sector that there is with heavy civil construction,” he said.“There is no one else that operates in as many markets as we do, which creates a lot of opportunity and diversity for us. In every recession that we’ve been through, we’ve actually grown instead of slowed down.