“I literally started from the bottom,” Todd told CONEXPO-CON/AGG Radio host Missy Scherber. “But I was lucky that I started with a smaller company, so there was room to grow, and had a boss that was open-minded about me. I wasn’t limited to the administrative aspect. He was open to me working in the field as well.”
Fast forward to 2011 and Todd started LMS as a disaster recovery consulting company, encouraged by her boss to do so to help with consulting and demolition work for a disaster recovery project in Alabama. After returning to California from that project, Todd enrolled in law school at Arizona State University, but wanted to stay in the construction world after graduation.
“After law school I put some feelers out there and didn’t get any good feedback from people about doing what I wanted to do,” Todd told Scherber. “They were just like, ‘No, we don’t have anyone who looks like you, we don’t have any women in those specific roles, you could be a project coordinator or something.’ So that’s what really jarred me to start LMS.”
Since then, Todd has also started a workforce development and apprenticeship program called “A Greener Tomorrow,” that focuses on putting women and people of color in jobs that pay a living wage in the construction world, even if they lack the knowledge or skills.
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“I started A Greener Tomorrow out of necessity, really,” Todd said. “I saw a lot of black and brown people were not being hired at construction sites. We were doing a lot of work in the inner cities and were flooded with people coming to the gates inquiring about how they can get a job, because they hadn’t seen any black or Latino people running the company. They saw workers, but they didn’t see people in leadership positions.”
Todd said a lot of construction jobs are filled by people knowing people, so companies looking to build a more diverse workforce need to start getting to know the people they want to bring on, often through community-based programs that already exist. One of the easiest ways to get people in the door to fill that workforce pipeline is to offer to teach them the trade.
A lot of the interest A Greener Tomorrow has been able to generate among target populations has been from LMS General Contractors’ work with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Section 3 projects and initiatives. She says HUD will often identify individuals who they have had trouble placing in other roles and will refer them to her, and Todd said she takes a strength-based approach to training them and has found little risk in doing so.
Currently Todd operates LMS General Contractors out of offices in both San Francisco and near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
