Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tiffany Veney. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Tiffany, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Our company’s mission is to help change the negative stereotype behind construction companies. We want to restore faith in construction by educating our clients on the full scope of their project, setting realistic expectations, and providing great customer service. Our goal is to absorb the stress of our clients with creating ease to the construction and design process.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I always had a love for architecture, construction and design. Growing up I didn’t see any women or knew of any women in the construction industry, so I told myself it was too much of a male dominated industry. I decided to go for what I felt was the safer route and received my BA degree in Banking and Finance. I was a first generation college student so there was no way I could gamble by being the “first” female breaking into construction. After a few years in my finance career, I ventured into motherhood. During that time, I decided to become a stay at home of mom of which turned into two children just 17 months apart. After 5 years, I returned to the workforce and decided to go into real estate. I started by getting my real estate license and also took property management position. Whle working as a property manager, I was able to oversee a few residential rehab projects. That process was eye opening and thrilling. That’s when I knew I wanted to be involved in construction full time. I started studying the trade under the contractors we had on site. I then would practice doing 3D renderings so that I can create the designs and layouts for our projects. Once we completed a few projects, I wanted to have more control over the construction projects so I decided to get my MHIC license and find my own team. I started my company in 2019 and I’ve been going nonstop since then with a myriad of residential and commercial remodels, as well as interior design projects. What sets Madison Street Build and Design Group from other companies is how intentional we are with understanding our clients vision to make sure we achieve their goals while ensuring the space is functional. I’m most proud of the passion we have behind our projects and the pleasure we attain by satisfying our clients. We want our clients to not only fall in love with their finished project but hopefully we’ve left a positive impact on them.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The biggest lesson I had to unlearn is that no matter how much you love construction it’s a business not a hobby. Since my passion brought me into construction, I did not enter it with the typical business profit model in mind. I would do projects and by the end would realize that I was making little to no money based on the amount of time I put into the project. I had to quickly learn to start shifting that mindset. Understanding that time is money is crucial and you want people to respect your time. The easiest way to do that is to make sure you’re charging for your time, notifying the client of any changes that will increase your time/cost, and not feeling guilty about it.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Construction is an industry of constant change! For one project, we hired an electrician for a full remodel which means he had to run all new wiring. It started of well until we had our inspection, we failed. I’m thinking no big deal it happens. We schedule another inspection, we fail again. I’m getting nervous because the things the inspector is pointing out I’m thinking a master electrician should know. So we have a talk and he said everything should be good. We fail AGAIN!! This time I’m livid because we just love about 3 weeks in this process. So I deducted from the things that caused us to fail is that this electrician only did residential work and he didn’t know commercial work as he stated. So I had another master electrician that I trusted to come on site and do a walk through. I had to have her oversee everything to make sure it was all up to code. We passed the next inspection. I learned three valuable lessons: add in future contracts a clause that will penalize the contractor for failing an inspection more than once, if my trusted trade isn’t available I either wait or take a referral, and I learned a few other things to look for when reviewing the electrical work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.madisonstreetdesigns.com
- Instagram: @madisonstreetllc