From saving $1,000 to bringing in $25 million a year

The company's legacy goes back to its great-grandfather Moses, a skilled brickmaker who originally came to the United States as a slave in 1790. His skills were passed down and honed from generation to generation, leading two of his grandchildren to establish a building company in Tennessee, also called McKissack & McKissack.

That company remains in the family, now based in New York and run by MacIsaac's twin sister, Cheryl. “My father always took us [to] Job sites, take us to the office. “We talked about it around the table. It's always been an integral part of our family,” McIsaac says.

Motivated by her desire to strike out on her own, and to see more Black women as executives in the construction industry, McIsaac withdrew $1,000 from her savings account and launched her company in 1990. Today, the company generates between $25 million and $30 million annually. , according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, manages projects worth $15 billion and has offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Baltimore.

“I remember in college, there were probably three women in my class, and my twin sister was one of them,” McIsaac says. “So it’s very rare for women to work in this industry, but we excel.”

MacIsaac left a six-figure-salary engineering job to start her company, and she quickly realized that even with a civil engineering degree from Howard University and relevant work experience, attracting clients was difficult.

Holding up an old projector, she showed slides of the work she had done to family members to help “sell my stuff.” I posted a job ad in the Washington Post and hired an employee.

“It was easy because I didn't have a bank that believed in me,” McIsaac says. “It took me five years to get my first $10,000 line of credit. I probably went to 11 banks and they told me 'no'… [but] “I had this burning passion inside that I had to do it, and it was going to work out for me.”

She used her communication skills to land her first company project: doing internal work at her alma mater. She says she and her one employee did all the work themselves, with MacIsaac putting in 80 hours a week.

One successful job led to another, and McKissack built a portfolio of work to show potential clients. She applied for jobs as a federal contractor, and got her foot in the door to work on construction projects at the White House and the U.S. Treasury Department building. Larger federal projects followed.

She says MacIsaac only paid herself $7,200 in her first year on the job. The second is 18 thousand dollars. She adds that she finally paid herself a $100,000 salary after nearly a decade, prioritizing paying her employees over herself along the way.

“I'm very proud of where we are, the projects we've done… and the impact we've made in people's lives,” McIsaac says.

The global construction industry is expected to be worth $13.9 trillion by 2037, according to a report. 2023 report From market research firm Oxford Economics. However, women still make up their faces Only 1.4% of construction CEOs All over the world, black women make up a small part of that.

Although the company names match, MacIsaac and her sister run separate businesses, but they have collaborated on many projects, often “business diaries” with each other, she says.

“We lean on each other in tough times,” she says. “It's great to have an identical twin who does the same thing I do in a bigger city like New York.” “The challenges you face are different from the challenges you face, but they are similar. So it's good to have someone to talk to.”

A healthy support system is rare for most Black and female construction managers, largely because there are so few of them, McIsaac says. Last year, I founded AEC standardizesa non-profit organization that provides professional opportunities for black talent in the fields of architecture, engineering, and construction.

“I couldn't make it happen until more black people and more women made it happen,” she says, adding: “Once more people who look like me are in this industry and dominating parts of this industry, then I can sit back and say, 'We did it.' that.”

One of them, she hopes, will be her daughter — a bioengineering student at New York University who could become the sixth generation of the McKissacks in the construction industry.

“I tell her all the time that all roads lead to McIsaac,” she says. “And I don't care how you got there.”

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