Working Today with Tomorrow in Mind

When Gaby DeLeon realized he had the opportunity to start his own business, he did what any rational man would do: he consulted his wife, Selma.

Selma and their four sons had followed Gaby’s career growth in project management throughout the Middle East and Europe. But now, she knew she had to put on the brakes, reminding him that his work was robbing him of the best years of his sons’ childhoods. Through the years, she had supported his career growth and helped steer him in the right direction, so now, after a few years of overseas work, he needed her advice more than ever.

On the family’s return to the Washington, D.C. area after his work abroad, Gaby was hired by a construction management company, but was quickly disillusioned by the goals and objectives of his employer and decided to resign after completing the first phase of a multi-phased project. The client offered Gaby the opportunity to complete the rest of the phased project as an independent consultant—an opportunity that came with incredible promise but tremendous risk. “When we returned from Saudi Arabia, we had to face the challenge of four college tuitions,” he remembers. “With the ages of our sons, we had to pay all four tuitions in the same year. Whatever money was earned overseas was quickly used up, and the prospect of starting my own business presented risks of continuity after a project is completed, so we needed to do a serious evaluation. Selma was cautious but urged me to do it, as long as I kept in mind the next step. By nature, I am more focused on the present, while she is more focused on tomorrow, so together we embody the principle of shaping our work today to guarantee our work tomorrow.”

Their approach paid off, so that today, Gaby is a founder and Principal of GRD Construction Consultants Inc. (GRD), a company dedicated to serving the private sector with construction consulting for real estate developers, commercial developers, and property managers. In 1998, GRD became certified by SBA as an 8(a) enterprise through the participation of Gaby’s second eldest son, allowing the company to offer service contracts to the federal government. “We have a whole spectrum of real estate transactions now,” Gaby explains. “Within a few years of receiving our SBA certification, we now have people working as contractors, budget analysts, financial analysts, project managers, and building managers that are full-time and on yearly contracts.”

The company was started in 1985, shortly after Gaby was hired for the role performed by his previous employer. He ran the company by himself initially with no immediate plans to grow, but when his sons joining him, they established a new business line to include contracts for services with the federal government. The business partnership with his sons became so successful over the years that the firm has since grown to twenty employees. Gaby and his youngest son, also an engineer, run the private clients side of the business, while the two older sons, an engineer and a business major, run the government contracts. “In general, our private clients invest in development projects, like office buildings,” Gaby explains. “Typically, the building developer surrounds himself with a number of consultants who are experts in their lines of work, from real estate attorneys, brokers, architects, engineers, general contractors, and facilities managers, among others. I take on the construction aspects   by coordinating the roles of the architect, engineers, regulatory agencies, and the general contractor. My focus is on understand what the client wants and making sure it gets delivered, familiarizing myself with their standards. My goal was to meet my clients’ vision of a product that delivers their financial objectives. This assures me of repeat business, thanks to the record I’ve established by working with them before. This working relationship is done through clear and uncompromising communications. “

Gaby grew up in the Philippines when the country was a young democracy undergoing big transitions. “The country was trying to find its identity, and its infrastructure was not yet in place,” he explains. “My parents were tremendously impacted by all the changes and lost a lot, but we developed the understanding that, while any material object could be taken from us, our most valuable possessions—things that could never be taken—were in our minds.” With that, education became the first priority for Gaby and his siblings, and their parents made it their mission to fund as much of their children’s academics as possible so that expenses would never inhibit their progress.

Gaby was the ninth to be born of ten children, which instilled in him a nature that was at once independent and cooperative. He never met his three oldest siblings, who died young due to inadequate health care. As a result, the DeLeon family learned to treasure every moment together and took nothing for granted. During summer breaks, the siblings went to the logging camps in the family’s concession areas and entertained themselves by hitching rides on logging trucks, learning how to do inventory on timber being hauled, and exploring neighboring villages. Their father was a hunting enthusiast, and when the children were old enough, they would pile into the family Jeep to go in search of deer and boar. As Gaby grew older, his father assigned him work bundling scrap timber and depositing proceeds of sales at the bank.

Gaby knew he wanted to work in the construction industry for as long as he could remember, having been inspired by his entrepreneurial parents. Shortly after the parents’ marriage, his mother, a schoolteacher, started a grocery store and restaurant, while his father, a salesman, started a lumberyard, where he worked for most of his life. As a child, Gaby frequently tagged along and was able to see first-hand the pride his father took in the projects he was building. “He was a huge role model for me,” he recalls. “He impressed upon me a sense of discipline, honesty, and integrity, and I realized I wanted to do the same work he did.”

Gaby attended college at Mapua Institute of Technology in Manila, where he majored in Civil Engineering. While he was dedicated to starting a career in the construction industry, he felt engineering would give him a broader background to draw from. “I dabbled in architecture, but I was always more interested in the how and the why behind the construction of a building,” he recalls. “I was very curious.”

After graduating college, he got married to his first wife, with whom he had four sons. He and his family spent a few years together in the Philippines while he worked for his father’s company until 1969, when he came to New York to attend Columbia University to earn a Masters in Operations Research. His time at Columbia was fragmented, however, by his obligations to his employer, first with a design engineering company, then a small general contractor. Gaby’s search for his ideal employment led him to Bechtel International, where he was assigned various hotel projects around the world and could take frequent trips back to the Philippines.

Gaby worked for Bechtel International in New York for five years, focusing on construction project controls management. He fully developed his skills and expertise in that niche, which shaped the career that followed. After his wife passed away, he met and married Selma, and he spent the majority of the early 1970’s traveling around the Middle East and Africa.

While Gaby enjoyed the work, he rarely got to see or communicate with his wife and sons. “I remember Selma telling me that it was wonderful how I was building my career, but I was missing crucial moments in life I could never get back,” he recalls. “I wasn’t very high up in the company yet, but I decided to go to my supervisors and tell them that they needed to either find me a job locally or send a posting for my family to come to me.” Unfortunately, neither option was possible, so he began to look for opportunities elsewhere.

Gaby’s ideal job with Bechtel had to come to a decision between career growth and family. The frequent international trips meant less time for Selma and four growing boys, so Gaby sought and eventually found employment with The Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), prompting the entire family to move to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Gaby’s employment with Aramco presented numerous advantages in career and family. During their time overseas, Selma was able to practice her nursing education from Hunter College in New York as a public health nurse. At Aramco, she was able to work with the company’s health system, doing research on communicable diseases in Saudi Arabia, and when the family was temporarily relocated to London for Gaby’s work for two years, Selma earned a second Masters degree in medical demography at the London School of Tropical Medicine.

Gaby enjoyed his position at The Arabian American Oil Company for several years until his children reached high school. At that point, the company insisted on sending his children back to the United States so that they would not lose touch with their roots, but Gaby and his wife worried they were losing them too early.  They decided their best option was to leave, but Gaby quickly realized how difficult it would be to find a new role in project management.

In 1984, the DeLeon family returned to Washington, D.C. in the hope that Gaby would find a role of equal stature that would allow the family to stay together. Shortly after arriving, he received a call from a former colleague, telling him to pack his bags for Paris. “He wanted me to join him in building five hotels for Disney in France,” he says. “I thought it sounded very exciting, but my wife told me I was being tempted by the same things that made us return from overseas in the first place. As much as one part of me wanted to go over there, the idea of having my family split apart or uprooted again was just too much.  In the tried-and-true tradition Selma and I had developed, I needed to choose my next move with the future in mind.”

With that, Gaby turned his former colleague down and instead joined the local construction management company that ultimately led to disappointment. He and his boss did not see eye-to-eye on the nature of construction management, and the company acted more as a general contractor. “In true construction management, a client’s wishes always come first,” Gaby explains. “It’s the construction manager’s responsibility to make sure that the client’s interests are served. If the construction manager does general contracting at the same time, everything becomes blurred. Thanks to this mindset, I had grown very close to my first client, so as soon as their first building was done, they offered to let me manage the rest of their projects.”

With the help of that first client, Gaby started GRD Construction Consultants, and while he had no intention of starting a business empire, the company quickly started growing at a rate so fast that he needed to hire representatives for each project. By 1997, he was receiving offers from other companies to buy GRD, but he turned them all down, finding he was happy with the growth of his company and foreseeing a successful future.  “Running your own company brings a great sense of accomplishment, and I really love the independence that comes with it as well,” he explains.

Throughout his experience with GRD, Gaby has realized that the best way to lead is by setting a good example. “If you don’t see your leader practice what they preach, their word doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “With this in mind, I try to model the pursuit of clear, intentional solutions. When I’m meeting with my employees, our first objective is to fully understand what the problems are. Once we hit on that, the underlying sources of issues come out and are addressed completely, paving a clearer pathway forward that leads to greater success.”

Today, Selma has retired after starting a travel agency in Bethesda. After 20 years, she finally decided to cut bait and sell, and the couple works to carry on Gaby’s parents’ legacy of pushing education for their children and grandchildren through an educational foundation. “Selma and I have put the financial structures in place so that our kids will always be able to have the education they need,” he says. “It was important to us to do this so that they have the freedom to do what I would advise any young person entering the working world to do: arm themselves with knowledge. I also encourage them to live by the same principle I have built my life around, working today with tomorrow in mind. There is always the challenge of what happens after a job is finished, and the way I guarantee the next job is by doing a good job now. It’s the fundamental principle that’s kept clients coming back to us for decades, just as it kept our family together when my sons were young, preserving the things that are most important in whatever context it’s applied.”

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