MOVING FORWARD
Woman drives construction business out of the rubble
Julie Savitt found her life turned upside down when her Guatemalan-born husband was deported, leaving her with a business to run in the male-dominated construction industry and three teenage kids to raise alone.
She soon learned her now ex-husband had racked up $250,000 in debts taking out loans from customers that didn’t want to pay her or work with a woman even though she’d launched and helped run the business. The 46-yearold president and founder of Lake Villa-based AMS Earth Movers Inc. shares her story of transforming the company into a successful enterprise. The business recently expanded to a new 30-acre yard and launched a new venture selling limestone aggregate, part of her plan to build a $25 million enterprise in five years.
The fallout: “When people started finding out [about her husband], the drivers, some of them propositioned me and thought that it was their job to take over the business. Some wouldn’t show up to the job in the morning. Some left the company. I had customers who said ‘I don’t work with a woman’ and I’m like ‘You’ve been working with me for three years, you just didn’t know it. I always ran the business operations. My husband’s sole responsibility (had been) to drive the truck.’ ”
Revamping: “I learned how to drive a truck. I began going to our vendor sites to learn about the products. I put myself through schooling — construction, trucking and stone. I really invested to learn.”
Restoring confidence: “The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call people and say this is my situation. This is what I can do. I’m going to be good for whatever my word is and either you’re going to trust me or you’re not, and I just hoped that honesty would prevail and that people would trust me. I refused to go bankrupt. I did whatever I could to make sure every vendor was paid current, everybody that worked for me was paid, however the means it took to do that.”
The means: “Sometimes it was credit cards. Sometimes it was take from Paul and give to Peter or whatever I had to do to make sure that I didn’t lose my relationships with my vendors and I didn’t ruin my relationships with my drivers, and thank God we worked through it. The biggest thing was I had to sell, sell, sell and just keep the money flowing in so that I could continue to pay whatever was outstanding. I decided that the only way I was going to survive was if I had cash flow. ... I only worked with clients that paid me in 30 to 60 days. It gave me the cash flow I needed.”
What keeps her up at night: “Collections. Construction is tough, and if there’s a delay in our customers collecting, then there’s a delay in us collecting. The second is that one of my gauges of success is to become one of the best places to work.”
Diversifying into limestone sales. “Anytime you dig up dirt, in order to build whatever is being built, you need to have stone to replace whatever they dug up. So I saw this market as opportunity. I knew about the products, but there were no women-owned businesses that could offer this product [for sale] for participation for government contracting. ... I’m the only woman in Illinois that’s certified as a women-owned business to sell stone for construction.”
Difficult encounters as a woman: “I’d walk on a job and they’d say ‘Hey baby, looking for your daddy,’ or I’d have drivers call me sugar and honey. That was so degrading.”
Dealing with it: “I had to stand my ground, and I had to make parameters of what I was going to tolerate and what I was not going to tolerate.”