Woman-owned and family-run, Tompkins Excavating is a leader in New York’s commercial excavation sector. Proud of the rich culture of authenticity and excellence it has established over the past few decades, the people at the heart of this company know what it means to roll up their sleeves while delivering the kind of service clients return for.
Tompkins Excavating is based in Putnam Valley, New York. The team mainly serves the lower Hudson Valley region, including Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Orange, and Dutchess Counties. Most commonly collaborating with developers and general contractors, the company is an expert in earthmoving, site utilities including water, sewer, and drainage, site concrete, asphalt paving, and rock crushing. In an industry where large projects take time to come to fruition, this team is proud to be the preferred service provider for a number of repeat customers.
As the first trade to arrive on site and the last to leave, the Tompkins Excavating team is guided by doing the right thing and honoring its word. The company is respected industry-wide for delivering on its promises with outstanding quality on everything from midsize to impressively large excavation projects. To achieve this, having the best people for the job is key. “We value the people who work with us, whether they are trade partners, clients, or, first and foremost, our employees,” says Owner and President, Stacey Tompkins. “I love our team. They’re phenomenal.”
As a token of appreciation, its ownership enjoys celebrating the hard work of everyone in the company (including those Stacey laughingly calls moving targets—truck drivers moving between locations) with pizza on Fridays. Tompkins Excavating’s annual awards ceremony recognizes employees with monetary prizes for consistency and excellence. And an annual picnic at the Tompkins residence welcomes a happy crowd of employees and their families, alongside a holiday party and team-building events throughout the year.
“For a comparatively small company, I feel that is amazing. Few people our size do that,” Tompkins says. Indeed, the firm treats the people who give its work meaning with real generosity and warmth.
Always learning, always growing
To ensure that a focus on healthy relationships is strong throughout its ranks, Tompkins has created a field leadership team that meets weekly. There are also monthly training sessions, where this group joins with the company’s management team to share in refresher leadership sessions guided by multimedia content.
The company’s dedication to being a source of growth and support for its people has translated into incredible growth inside the company itself. Quadrupling its staff over the past eight years has resulted in company revenue also skyrocketing, taking its annual earnings from under $1 million a decade ago to more than 10 times that today. Working toward building optimal efficiency with its existing team and asset base, the company has its sights set on achieving ever-greater goals at a responsible pace.
While every project is a proud moment at Tompkins Excavating, works that benefit communities at large are especially close to the company’s collective heart. One such project in collaboration with Turner Construction is for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization in Yorktown Heights, New York that provides guide dogs to people experiencing challenges to their vision. The project is ongoing and, Tompkins says, has been a joy to work on.
Another project the team is especially proud of comprises affordable housing, while a mixed-use development with Unicorn Construction is bringing beautiful condominiums to the center of town, and new life to the area.
The company is also proud of the rock crushing and recycling capabilities afforded by its use of ProMac’s equipment and service. Few people know that, thanks to ProMac, Tompkins Excavating can reuse materials from jobsites on new projects, reducing waste and improving efficiency. Another exciting collaboration is with TRAYD, an innovative payroll software company dedicated to the construction sector, whose cutting-edge platform Tompkins Excavating is proud to help test and refine—gaining valuable efficiencies in its own payment structures while supporting TRAYD’s mission to transform payroll solutions for the industry.
A leap of faith
Starting as a landscaping business, which saw Co-owner and Vice President Mark Tompkins investing in a lawnmower when he was in his teens, the company has flourished and prospered in ways he never could have foreseen. Responding to a customer request for structural work, Mark leased his first excavation equipment, and the young business took an entirely new direction.
When the couple met in 1990, Stacey was secure in her career as a successful Food Service Director, with clients like Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. Overseeing the dining arrangements for around 3,000 people each day, the young go-getter was thoroughly versed in the complexities of organization under pressure by the time Mark’s right-hand administrator announced her departure from his company, around the time the firm had just entered landscaping construction.
Stacey decided to say farewell to the path she was on and join Mark in his venture. “My husband was brought up in the entrepreneurial world,” she says, but for her, exchanging a secure career for a position at her future husband’s business was a new experience. “I took a leap of faith, contrary to how I had been brought up.”
The unorthodox decision raised eyebrows amongst her closest friends and family. It all worked out well in the end, however. “We got married and it was a great opportunity to help out in the business and raise children, too,” she says, describing how the Tompkins siblings grew up largely on site.
Taking up her duties in the office of the then-residentially focused company meant taking many pressing phone calls and becoming closely involved in customer care. Stacey quickly came to understand the business, what people really needed, and how their pain points could be alleviated. From this position, she helped establish the company’s reputation for service excellence and turn it into the thriving business it is today.
Tenacity became her trademark in the process, something that would serve her well later on. Her hard-earned Minority or Women-owned Business Enterprise certification is just one case in point. Although it took 11 years to obtain and required the services of an attorney, Stacey now advises women in the same situation to stay the course and not give up.
Hampered in the process by the simple fact that Mark started the business, it took years for Stacey to convince the board that, as the majority owner, she was the leader making the cogs turn at Tompkins Excavation. What seemed like an endless mission at one time turned out to be worth the exercise in resolve, however. “I was denied three times. You just can’t give up,” she advises.
Family matters
Being a good mother, wife, boss, and business partner is a complex task, and the Tompkins family wisely navigates the waters with the guidance of a business coach. Despite being utterly in love with their work, talking shop in their downtime is minimized—a habit that is easier to quit for some than others, Stacey notes with a smile.
She is sanguine about their life as family entrepreneurs. “It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing; you just need to connect with people,” she says. “They want to feel that they’re valued, and they want to follow somebody whom they feel inspired by.”
Today, two of Stacey and Mark’s three sons follow in their parents’ footsteps. Operations Manager and Lead Estimator Kevin Tompkins is a civil engineer, while Resource Coordinator and Development Associate Justin Tompkins comes from a background in real estate and asset management. “Our three sons, two of whom are in the business, grew up in it,” says Stacey (their youngest chose to pursue a career in finance outside the company). “Kevin learned how to operate a machine when he was a three-year-old sitting on dad’s lap.”
Working full-time in hands-on positions in the field alongside the rest of the onsite teams, theirs is not a family culture of detached privilege but one of pragmatism and personal involvement on the jobsite.
Women in construction
As a board member of the Building & Realty Institute, Stacey enjoys the ability to give back to the industry through her work. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Business Council of Westchester and her local town board.
Driven to help improve access to good careers for youngsters—especially young women in the industry—Stacey served as a mentor in the Her Honor Mentoring program for a year and founded Women in Construction, a small organization focused on mentoring young women in the industry through monthly luncheons.
Thanks to her untiring efforts, Stacey has been honored with a number of awards for herself and her company. “That has been exciting,” she shares. “Awards bubble up from work we don’t even realize we’re doing.” A case in point is the Walk in Her Shoes Award, which she is receiving this December, courtesy of United Way, and which she did not anticipate. There was also another surprise honoring of her work at a dinner hosted by the Women’s Enterprise Development Center (WEDC).
As the leader responsible for cultivating team spirit, Stacey is open about the challenges and the joys. In a business where people’s lives are at stake, keeping everyone safe is a priority. “You have to just get up and keep doing it—and have a good attitude,” she says. “It isn’t easy; it’s way harder than it sounds.” This is where good self-care and a bit of healthy perspective come in: “As long as everyone’s safe, the rest can be fixed or replaced,” she says.
New challenges, new offices, new future
Beyond the constant pressure to expand Tompkins Excavating’s range of capabilities and maintain its place at the forefront of its industry, the company is also building new offices, a project that will unfold over the next three years. With its crisp design, the new facility will be adjacent to the existing operation, providing much-needed space to expand. In the meantime, fine-tuning workflow is a priority to ensure that every project receives the attention to detail it deserves.
Aiming for 20 to 30 percent growth over the next two or three years, preserving and improving efficiency remains pivotal to all the company’s operations. “We want to be the best that we can be. We can definitely do a lot more work with what we have,” Stacey says.
And to her team, her message is simple and heartfelt: “Just keep doing what you’re doing. We’re so grateful for you every single day,” she says with a smile.
