We are a construction company. We tend to typically be out in the field most of the day, but beside that, we’ve been able to save on overhead by running the company from home. This has actually been great for us since we are a young company. My partner, Alejandro Reyes, and I have been able to work for that past 3.5 years from home without needing a physical office.

Personally, it has been great. I recently had a baby (already 13 months old) and the system has worked out great. Being a woman in construction, I was somewhat worried about raising a family. I always wondered how I would be able to work the field pregnant and then figure out how to deal with maternity leave the first few months. The biggest benefit by far is that we are business owners, we get to control the work quantity and the flow. The biggest advantage for me has been, being able to stay home with my son for the first year. Not only have I been able to share many first moments with him, but I have been able to finish two full jobs in the time I was pregnant and he turned one. Of course, I have to mention that my partner, Alejandro, took care of a big chunk of the field job.

That being said, there are some pitfalls. For us, hosting clients meetings has been a little tricky since we don’t have a dedicated space. Thankfully, we’ve been able to host most online. Along with that, the line between personal / family time and work becomes blurry. I have enjoyed working from home for personal family reasons, but realistically moving forward we would like to have a dedicated office space. We have noticed that our work life has no schedule working from home an we have caught ourselves working more than sharing time with our families.

I graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Miami in Florida. During my time in school I felt the need to start getting into the field and seeing what it was really like to work as an Architect. I worked part time for a small firm and I remember being nervous because I felt I knew nothing of what I was being asked to do. Of course as time passed, I learned and realized it wasn’t so hard after all. I’ve always thought of myself as being business orientated, and if I was going to work as an Architect I might as well start my own business. I also consider myself a pretty applied person in school, so I decided in my last year, to work towards my MBA parallel with my last year in Architecture. Unfortunately, my mom passed away right at the start of that school year and that threw me off.

I ended up graduating with my bachelors and got a job at firm in Coral Gables, Fl – Behar Font. I’d say I am where I am today because of this firm. I met my business partner and I got into the world of construction. I learned so much about the world of architecture here that I started to question if this is truly what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. My first solo project was a Starbucks, I sound like a broken record always telling the same story, but it’s worth sharing. I was so nervous, I felt as if I was being thrown into fire and I hated the feeling of failure. I’d say a quality I would like to never lose is honesty. I spoke to the engineers on the job and told them, “hey I have NO idea what I am looking at and I don’t understand anything the contractor is asking me to do, can you help me?”. Each one of them took time off their schedule to walk me thru the construction site and show me everything that was important for me to complete the job. That’s when I realized, wow, I have so much more to learn.

I remember being bored at work and always talking to my co workers, and complaining about how we need to be out in the field more to be able to do a better job. So, I decided, along with Alejandro, to pursue our General Contractor license. That’s when everything changed. I ended up leaving this firm, actually kept working with the Developer who was the client for the project I was on, but helping out in the construction side. Unfortunately, things  went bad on that project and I had no where to go, that’s when we opened Arko Construction. We opened it with a 5 year plan in mind, not expecting much, little did we know we were going to start working a lot sooner than expected. It’s been almost four years since we opened up our company and this year we are getting ready to reach a project threshold we did not expect for a couple more years down the road.

We’re Arko Construction, a young construction company based in South Florida. We specialize in anything from interior remodels to ground-up construction, including single family homes, multifamily and commercial projects. As mentioned previously, we consider ourselves honest and transparent. Something hard to believe for many clients who unfortunately have dealt with the opposite in the industry. Clients can be sure that when working with us, they will have everything at their hands to be able to execute the project of their vision.

We started Arko Construction as a side business to be developed further into the future, and if it went well, we would leave our jobs and dedicate ourselves to it. As life always has it, things don’t go as planned. Within a year into the business, my job ended. The project I was managing went bankrupt and there was nothing else to do. Fortunately, Arko had it’s first big construction project, and we thought we were going to be fine. We were, but with a couple big hiccups down the line.

I went from a having a steady salary to bringing home $0 a month. I was so scared, my business partner fortunately was still working with the Construction firm since his project had a ways to go. I also have to add a personal note, I was 6 months pregnant. You can imagine, how we felt. Thankfully, my husband had his job but our gears had to change. We decided to make sacrifices to see things thru, we moved back home, to our parents house. I didn’t know what to do. I remember speaking to Alejandro (my business partner) and discussing not pursuing Arko anymore, lets just stick to being an employee, this is too much, I am about to have a baby and I have no income, what am I thinking.

The project we were working on at Arko was actually a great one, but like any starting business, most of the income needs to be reinvested into the company. Even though the money we were making wasn’t bad, we really couldn’t take it home because we had quite a large overhead to cover, just for the business to continue running. That year, 2022, was tough. We didn’t make payroll, we couldn’t afford it. We spoke so many times about quitting, specially after I gave birth. We still had the project going, but we didn’t see how we could survive. We had nothing else coming in, I needed to work.

First quarter of 2023 came, we got a new project and decided to tackle it. We did great, we somehow were organized enough to have some profit and once we hit the 3rd quarter of the year, we got our first paycheck. I believe that month it was about $800, we were so happy. Thankfully, we have been able to increase our payroll every month, to the point this has become our full time job, not a side hustle anymore.

Word of mouth has been the best source of new clients. We actually haven’t marketed ourselves, but thankfully haven’t had to. Our work speaks for it self. We’ve had a steady roll of projects / clients thanks to previous clients recommending us. The main reason why are: quality of work, communication and transparency. We hope to be able to maintain these qualities for the life of Arko Construction.