We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christine Barshtak. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christine below.
Christine, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?
Every single time I travel and I’m still a slave to my emails – which is remaining in service to the clients, to the employees, to the stake holders – I wonder what it would be like to have a regular job where I can go away, tune out and turn off. I know it’s the 2020s and everyone is “expected” to be on call 24/7 but when you are the owner there is absolutely no choice in the matter! We rent a beach house on the shore every summer for our two son’s birthdays – which are two days apart. Last summer we had some unfortunate employee turnover, we hired a series of project managers who were not the right fit, and while on vacation I became the project manager for a critical project for a huge client at a crucial time of the project – the end!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Finaly General Contracting was my family’s business, started by my father in 2001. I worked in finance on Wall Street for a decade before I joined. Even though I went to Babson College to study finance & entrepreneurship, I had no intentions on working for my father. It happened the year after my first son was born and I left my job at a private equity firm. I wandered into my father’s office to use the printer and started looking through boxes. Before this, I was an analyst – analyzing other businesses primarily using financial statements. This was an opportunity for me to learn how the statements get built. So I taught myself Quickbooks, enrolled at NYU to get a master’s in construction, and worked my way through project management and VP of Finance to becoming the President when my father retired.
What I am most proud of is that Finaly is now a certified Woman Owned Business. There was no role here for me when I wandered through the door in 2010 and now I am responsible for almost 50 employees. The business has grown organically to more than ten times the size it was when I started and we are well respected throughout the New York City construction industry.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Get a great social media manager! I linked up with Caitlin Bendersky from Sage Marketing years ago to help me build both the Finaly GC brand and the Finally A Boss Lady brand. The engagement has been terrific due to Caitlin’s team’s expertise. She introduced us to a phenomenal photographer, Petro Onysko, who helps us shoot content for finished projects. She also helps guide us to what the audience engages with during projects (for example: everyone loves before and after shots). When you have a framework for what kind of content to put on social media it helps you to be much more disciplined!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Resilience isn’t necessarily from one single story, it is more in the repetition of showing up every single day and getting the work done. We have had set backs, and bad projects, and employee turnover. Like everyone else, we had COVID take the wind out of our “sales”. 2019 was a banner year in Finaly history as it was our highest grossing revenue to date! It took three years to rebuild in a landscape where it seems no one wanted to return to full time office work – which is what we do! We build office space! The resilience is in staying the course. Of doing smaller projects, i.e., more volume at less margin, which means being more mindful of overhead and managing cash flow. It means being a project manager, and the chief marketing officer, business development, and the head of HR, and even sometimes IT, when there are problems that need to be solved and you are working with a leaner team. When you own a business you have no choice but to resilient – market conditions, cyclicality, problems on site, issues with the personnel – these are all your mountains to climb. So it’s one day at a time.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.finalygc.com
- Instagram: finallyabosslady; finalygc
- Linkedin: christine barshtak
Image Credits
Photos by Petro Onysko