Ethan Walton
36, project director
McCarthy Building Cos. Inc.
Denver
With a master’s degree in strategic management and a combination of technical and people, Walton may have found the successful recipe.
A job that linked to the bar and to place concrete for a telecommunications business of a family friend when he was 15 years old was his interest in construction. “I always liked to separate things and go back to them,” he says.
Walton started his career at McCarthy Building Cos. As a project engineer in 2011, after obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Construction Management from the Purdue University, where he received the Top Builder Award from his class. While working on the Superintendent track in McCarthy and refining his construction skills, Walton realized that he wanted to move to the organizational business management organization and organization.
“I returned to school to get my MBA, and that really helped me to start addressing the strategy and organizational skills,” he says.
The Master’s Degree in Business Administration and Strategic Management of the University of Indiana led him to his current role as project director.
“Business elements are very different than engineering and construction. Engineering is really governed by the laws of physics, and the way a problem breaks down is very different from how you analyze business problems and organizational problems and people’s problems,” he says. “The graduated school has helped me to build frameworks to make sense of these other elements, which I think helped Springboard my career in the role of the director and, in hope, beyond.”
Walton projects in manufacturing, health care, education, advanced technology and aviation markets have been worth 100,000 to $ 1 billion. Most memoribly, he directed the construction to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kan. The $ 48 million, $ 48 million project was recognized as a best of the best finalist in 2023, and was named Midwest Project of the Year in 2023.
Walton says that some management systems he learned in this project have influenced the way they form teams and scales. The agro-defense installation “epitomizes all the reasons why I entered the construction,” says Walton of the ten-year project. “Nothing has been built in 100 years and nothing will be built as in another 100 years.”
Walton is involved with the Rocky Mountain design chapter-Build Institute of America, the United States Green Buildings Council, the International Institute of Sustainable Laboratories and AGC in Colorado, for which he participated in his future leaders’ forum. Outside, children help build bird houses at Tennyson Center for Children, an organization that supports the mental health and well -being of young people affected by trauma and other adverse experiences.
“Once I felt that” the goal is not to live forever, the goal is to build something that will do, “and this resonated with me,” says Walton.
Although this statement initially applies to its construction projects, it says that it is now extending to build people, teams, an organization and even a family. “I think this is my main driving force: the sense of building bigger things than I,” says Walton.
