John Fish created New England’s largest general contractor, Suffolk, on the backs of laborers. Now he’s betting the future is filled with hardwired hard hats and AI foremen.
By John Hyatt, Forbes Staff
It’s well below freezing on this December morning and John Fish is outside, standing near the edge on the 33rd floor of South Station Tower, a half-finished skyscraper in downtown Boston. He points to a bright red crane below as it carries a pallet of metal panels through the frigid air and explains his plans to automate it.
“There’s a camera on the crane itself that watches the boom and sees its swing and registers all that information,” Fish says in a distinct Boston accent. He’s dressed in black leather loafers, blue slacks, a neon construction vest, safety goggles and a hard hat. “How can you get more picks per hour in a safe manner? We’ve got to be very, very careful.”
Down on the busier 14th floor, over the relentless thumping of pneumatic nail guns and the din of grinding steel, Fish describes how the robotic revolution is changing his construction sites: Suffolk is introducing two-foot-tall machines (think miniature army tanks) that zoom around and print blueprints and layouts for workers to follow, speeding construction and reducing errors. “We’re going to be putting it on all our jobs,” he says.
Photo by Michael Prince for Forbes
A 63-year-old construction industry lifer, Fish made a fortune building high-rises from Massachusetts to California. He’s worth $2.3 billion, thanks to his 100% stake in $6 billion (revenue) Suffolk, the Boston-based construction firm which in the last 20 years has built more than 150 million square feet of commercial real estate in the U.S., including much of Boston’s skyline and hotels in Los Angeles and Miami.
Now he’s looking to disrupt the $2.1 trillion industry that made him so successful. His Suffolk Technologies division is building new construction-focused software products, some of which it’s spinning off into separate ventures, while his venture investing arm has taken stakes in dozens of ambitious construction tech startups that do everything from 3D printing of walls to manufacturing emission-free portable power generators.
“Our industry is the only industry in the world where productivity has gone down in the last 50 years as opposed to going up,” Fish says while taking Forbes on a tour of Suffolk’s ultramodern headquarters in Roxbury, a working-class neighborhood in southern Boston. “Think about the Empire State Building. It was built in the 1930s and took 14 months to build. Today it would take five years.”
One reason: Many in the industry want nothing to do with robotics or AI. The general contractors, subcontractors, unions and multibillion-dollar management firms that run construction sites have “entrenched analog ways of working,” according to a report from McKinsey. Says Brent Thielman, an equity analyst at D.A. Davidson who covers engineering and construction, “Technology is accepted at a very slow rate in this industry, and that’s probably going to be the same case for the foreseeable future. At the end of the day, it is a labor market.”
WORKER DRONES
Some 4 million robots clock in for work every day around the world, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Most are assembling electronics, household appliances and cars, but some have found work in less expected places.
Julos/Getty Images
Bartender
Name: Makr Shakr 3.0
Manufacturer: Makr Shakr (introduced 2013)
Cost: $115,000
Average human bartender salary: $34,490
Fry Cook
Name: Flippy
Manufacturer: Miso Robotics (2017)
Cost: $48,000 per year
Average human fry cook salary: $31,000
Priest (Funerals)
Name: Pepper
Manufacturer: SoftBank Robotics (2014); Nissei Eco
Cost: $442
Average cost to hire a human priest: Up to $2,000
Security Guard
Name: Knightscope K5
Manufacturer: Knightscope (2013)
Cost: Less than $9 per hour
Average human security guard salary: $16 per hour
A labor market that has long struggled to attract enough laborers, that is. There were more construction job openings in 2022 than any previous year in the 23 years that the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) has been keeping track. Plus, costs are up: Wages in construction rose 34% between 2012 and 2022, according to government statistics, while input costs (steel, cement, wood) have jumped nearly 40% since early 2020, per ABC. Fish is convinced that robots will be key to solving the labor shortage—and keeping costs down. Putting robots on job sites is no small order: There will be regulatory scrutiny, client skepticism, financial pressures and pushback from human workers. But Fish insists it’s necessary regardless of the obstacles.
The other half of the equation is data. Fish says Suffolk already has its own “special sauce” after a decade-long investment in analytics, which the firm uses to track progress and manage costs at its 100-odd active job sites. To spice up that special sauce, Suffolk has been reinvesting its earnings into new technologies and products that it’s developing under Suffolk Technologies, which he set up in 2019. Fish has spun off one product (a cost-estimating software called Ediphi) into its own company, with plans for a second (Edge, a job site planning tool) this year.
Simultaneously, Fish is nurturing a large portfolio of construction-related startups. Since its founding, Suffolk Technologies has invested over $50 million across more than 50 companies, such as Rugged Robotics (maker of those miniature army tanks), Canvas (an R2-D2-style robot that speeds up drywall installation), Augmenta (a generative AI tool that drafts building designs) and, most notably, OpenSpace. That San Francisco–based artificial intelligence startup converts video footage into virtual job sites that can be explored remotely and was recently valued at some $900 million.
About half of Suffolk’s portfolio companies have participated in its annual six-week accelerator program. (“Think Shark Tank but much friendlier,” Fish says.) Last summer the company raised $85 million from outside investors, plus $25 million from Fish’s own wallet, to fund more startups and reinvest in the most promising ones.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Portfolio companies get the opportunity to experiment on Suffolk job sites and develop working relationships with its subcontractors, while Suffolk gets equity and insight into the bleeding edge of construction tech. “We want to be the convener of the conversations on how the built world is being disrupted,” Fish says.
That’s smart, because this is clearly a disrupt-or-be-disrupted moment in the construction industry. The work-from-home boom has crushed traditional commercial real estate, decimating demand for the sort of downtown office building that was Suffolk’s pre-pandemic bread and butter. (South Station Tower broke ground in early 2020.) “The commercial sector is sort of upside down,” Fish says. “Today nobody’s building an office building.”
To offset the slowdown, Suffolk is bidding on other types of projects, such as data centers, airports, hospitals and medical research facilities, casinos and government projects. Fish hopes that his tech can help Suffolk craft lower-cost bids that can be completed more quickly with fewer overruns.
Fish grew up in construction. His late father, Edward Fish, ran Boston-based Peabody Construction, which grew out of a local building business started in 1891 by Edward’s grandfather. As a teenager, Fish and his older brother, Ted, would accompany their dad to job sites and learn the family craft. “He wanted us to be laborers to learn from the bottom up,” Fish recalls. “My dad would always emphasize the value of the dollar. It’s, like, branded in the back of my head.”
A dyslexic, Fish struggled in school but excelled in sports and was recruited to play football at Bowdoin, where he picked up a political science degree before returning to the family business in 1982. It was an opportune time. Peabody, which hired only unionized labor, was getting squeezed by general contractors hiring lower-paid nonunion workers. In response, Fish Sr. created Suffolk, a separate company that would hire nonunion laborers, and he put his younger son in charge. As Suffolk grew, it started to compete with Peabody, which was run by his older brother. “My father kinda pitted us against each other for a period of time,” Ted Fish says. The two brothers are close now, though Ted recalls that John was a “tenacious competitor” as they scrapped for projects. “You don’t want to be on the other side of him.” (Peabody Construction was dissolved in 2007, and Ted now runs a Boston-based office construction firm called Roundhill.)
ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK WELSH FOR FORBES
HOW TO PLAY IT
By Jon D. Markman
The proliferation of robotics and artificial intelligence software is transforming the physical world and creating opportunities for investors. A smart way to play this trend is PTC, a subscription-based software company that makes tools to help businesses engineer, manufacture and service products. The company’s Industrial Internet of Things division uses AI that makes robots on factory floors more efficient and connects other manufacturing processes to a centralized network, creating a digital thread. Fourth-quarter subscription growth was 26% year over year. Based on revenue growth, shares could reach $260 within 18 months, up 40% from current prices.
Jon D. Markman is president of Markman Capital Insight and editor of Fast Forward Investing.
John Fish won a key client in the early 1990s: the nursing home magnate Abe Gosman (d. 2013), at the time a Forbes 400 member who boasted a net worth of nearly $500 million in 1996 (nearly $1 billion in today’s terms). “He took me under his wing,” recalls Fish, who eventually built more than 100 nursing homes and assisted living centers for Gosman. Many of those facilities were in California and Florida, which helped Suffolk grow nationally and open new offices in Los Angeles and Miami. Then came 2008.
“We lost over 50% of our [business] within a four-hour period,” he says. “I got phone call after phone call after phone call: ‘The job’s not going forward; pull your guys off the job.’ ” The economic meltdown was “a complete wakeup call. We had to have a much clearer value proposition than our competitors.”
One step he took was to begin gathering information at construction sites to better measure efficiencies, safety concerns and cost overruns. Jit Kee Chin, a McKinsey alum with a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, joined Suffolk in 2017 to make sense of all that data—and put it to use. “I was the first chief data officer that I know of in construction,” she says.
Now all those numbers are packed into what Fish calls his Mission Control team’s dashboard, a real-time monitor of Suffolk’s active construction projects. At sites like South Station Tower, a foreman enters information into tablets tracking budgetary, scheduling, safety and operational metrics. “What we’re able to do is see issues before they happen,” says Kelsey Gauger, who oversees the 17-person Mission Control team from a CIA-style command center in Roxbury. “We’re able to put resources out there, swarm the project [and] provide them with support.”
Next up: many more robots. Fish plans to pour millions of dollars into Suffolk’s robotics center, which is breaking ground this spring in Roxbury. The facility will be a playground for Suffolk’s portfolio companies and a site for developing in-house, proprietary tech. “Somebody comes in with a solution, we can try it out in that area and bring it to our job sites,” he says.
Back at South Station Tower, as a human crane operator carefully navigates the boom hundreds of feet below, Fish is at ease as he considers a future with machines replacing at least some of the workers. “Something’s gotta give,” he says. “There has to be more efficiency.”
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