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192: From Hard Bid to $450 Million: Dave Fontaine Jr., CEO of Fontaine Bros., on Reinventing the Family Business
In 1933, two teenage immigrant brothers signed over their house to buy $12,000 worth of lumber and bet everything on a single job. Ninety years later, their great-grandson runs the $450 million construction firm they built.
Dave Fontaine Jr. is the fourth generation to lead Fontaine Brothers, and he joins Rens to unpack the question every multi-generation business eventually has to answer: how do you modernize without losing the culture that got you here?
They trace Fontaine's shift from a hard-bid contractor to a CM-at-risk powerhouse — a move that required building a whole new sales and pre-construction engine, and surviving 30-plus losing pitches before the first win. That reinvention helped take the company from $65 million to $450 million in revenue, without ever chasing growth as a target. Dave also gets into how Fontaine balances public and private work, why saying no to projects is one of the hardest calls a leader makes, where AI is actually moving the needle in construction, and why the soft skills — picking up the phone, being straight with people — only get more valuable as the technology improves.
Listen now to hear how one of New England's oldest construction firms is building for its next hundred years.
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