Mid Hudson Construction sets itself apart with community focus, resilience, versatility
Roughly two decades ago when Ray and Scott Travis first started with Mid Hudson Construction Management (MHCM), the company only had two or three employees and focused solely on small construction management projects. Since then, the two have built it up to an almost 50-person operation, expanding its capabilities to manage and develop products large and small, in sectors from commercial to health care to multifamily residences.
Both Ray and Scott had companies of their own. While Ray, now president and CEO of MHCM, was an architectural professional, Scott, now vice president and chief operating officer, had been in the construction industry as well, as a distributor of wholesale building products. They were in the third generation in the business, following their father and grandfather.
“Ray and I got together, and when we did, it complimented us very well as far as his expertise from a project management side of things and my field experience and actually being in the trenches all along,” Scott Travis said. “So when we got together at 20 and 23 or 24 years old, we already had a pretty dynamic edge on the market, because not only were we operators, but we experienced everything from residential to commercial, to construction management, where we evolved into building all the products that we sell today.”
Operating from its headquarters in Poughkeepsie, Mid Hudson Construction”™s reach stretches all the way from Albany down to Westchester, and to Connecticut and New Jersey. The company is in the midst of a slew of exciting projects, in spite of all the difficulties and delays the construction industry has faced as a result of supply chain challenges throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Scott, the company”™s ability to improve preplanning and efficiency of scheduling to complete projects and benchmarks on a timely basis when many of its competitors have been failing to do so can be attributed to their emphasis on being a solution-driven company.
“We take all the other things that people use as excuses and basically work through them because we have the ability in house to be able to answer all the questions that sometimes the professionals can’t even deliver, based on supply chain,” he said. “We have a team that instead of just saying, ”˜We have a lead time issue, move on to the next,”™ we actually find solutions. (We”™re a) solution-driven company every day, all day. That’s why we’ve grown considerably in probably one of the toughest times.”
When Covid hit, the company was in the middle of an office move, with business going on as usual. After losing a significant amount of sales like many small and midsized businesses in the region and country overall, they were able to bounce back and avoid laying off any employees in the field or office over the past two years.
Another part of Mid Hudson”™s ability to remain resilient through these challenges comes from its longstanding emphasis on maintaining good relationships with subcontractors and creating safe and reliable work environments.
“We have the capacity to be able to really work with local suppliers and local subcontractors, all throughout New York state, because for the last 20 years, we’ve had such a great relationship with our subcontractors,” Scott said. “So we’re not just dealing with one-off subcontractors. They want to work for Mid Hudson Construction Management. Whereas, you know, all of our competitors have spent the last 20 years and maybe not treated them so well. So when everybody who works for Mid Hudson once wants to work for them again, it’s easy for us to be able to go out and secure these products and deliver them in a timely manner because of that relationship.”
Another facet of MHCM is its versatility in terms of types of projects it can work on with expertise. Commercial, industrial, health care, education, residential and multifamily are all on the table for the company, a factor that, according to Ray, sets them apart from competitors.
The company”™s most recent projects include Hudson Valley Hospice”™s new $10 million, 15,000-square-foot Hospice House, for which it just broke ground. The Hyde Park facility is expected to open in 2023. MHCM will kick off the build for another health care center next month, this one on the Mount Saint Mary College campus in Newburgh. The community health center is a $6 million project.
It is also working on large multifamily residential projects in the Hudson Valley, currently a hot area considering the number of people moving into the area in the wake of Covid. One of these projects, Fulton Landing in the town of Poughkeepsie, will contain 70 units upon completion.
Having both been born in the Hudson Valley and remaining residents to this day, Ray and Scott both said that it is important to them that MHCM be an upstanding part of the community, and also seek to run its development and landlord side of the business to cater toward tenants and organizations that help the community.
Scott was also recently named MHCM”™s representative as a board member for the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation. The business also recently joined the Orange County Partnership, another economic development agency. The brothers view this as an opportunity to keep MHCM”™s finger on the pulse of economic changes around the Hudson Valley, to help the community thrive and to attract new businesses to the area, using their own experiences to help do the work to keep the area buzzing.
“I think we can help those boards and, with our success, we can be able to navigate and hopefully fill a void that nobody else is willing to fill,” Scott said. “So I’m excited to see what voids are out there and how I can fill them best with my experience.”