Getting started
What it's like building a female minority-owned construction business
October 6, 2021
By Curt Trnka | Blue Print Editorial Staff
By Curt Trnka | Blue Print Editorial Staff
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Victoria Messina needed a name. It couldn't be hard to pronounce or complicated. It needed to be simple and ideally something that she could one day hand over to her daughters, Leah and Adriana.
Leah and Adriana... Le. Ad. Lead. Her husband was sitting at the kitchen table with her to help with brainstorming. She pitched Lead to him. "It's perfect." And that’s how Lead Construction Services was born. Victoria has been around the construction industry her entire life. Her father owns a large general contractor business, so naturally, Victoria went to school for criminal justice. Wait. What? “I decided to do criminal justice,” says Messina. “I loved it. I wanted to be a homicide detective. I ended up working for the District Attorney's office, and I came to a point where it was like, OK, you either go to law school, which I didn't want to do because I had just finished school, or you find another career path.” Messina talked with her father about construction again. “I said, you know what? Let me try this construction thing again, and I'll see how it works. And I ended up loving it!” Now Victoria's days are … busy. She and her husband are remodeling their basement. She’s a mother of three. (Her son didn’t make the cut to be part of the Lead name.) And she's a female minority business owner. “I'm doing the walkthroughs, I'm doing the estimating, I'm doing the accounting, and the project management,” she says. “So yeah, it's kind of crazy, but it's a good crazy.” One of her recent projects was a joint venture for Children's Hospital of Philadelphia with Target Building Construction. Together, they split the project from start to finish, but not every job is that easy. In fact, Victoria’s identified the hardest part of getting into the construction industry. “It takes tough skin,” she says. “It really does take tough skin to do this. The guys that I work with laugh. They joke; they call it alligator skin. You really have to have a tough mentality to be able to push through. “I'll be on a jobsite, and people are staring at me 'cause I'm a woman. I'm out on the jobsite, and if they're not used to seeing women and the fact that I'm, you know, the president of my company, I don't want them to look at me and say, ‘OK, well, she's a girl. She doesn't know what she's doing.’ I might not be able to physically do what you do, but mentally, I can do it.” Victoria often ends her crazy days back at that same kitchen table. Today’s she’s looking over a brand new set of project portfolios with the Lead logo on them. Lead was the right name. “I have to lead by example,” she says. “I’m creating something for my daughters.
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