|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When he was growing up, Richard Jones had a family friend who owned a construction company, which piqued Jones’s interest in the industry. So much so, that when he was old enough to work, one of his first jobs was working on a construction site at a local airport.
“I went away from it for a while, especially through my education and early career stops, but came back around to it,” Jones says. “It was almost like a full circle moment for me, as I was able to return to something that I had always been fascinated with.”
Since 2018 Jones has overseen design, permitting, construction, logistics, utilities, and more for approximately 300 new builds for Heartland Dental.
The road to his position as director of design and construction for the Effingham, Illinois-based company took some different turns, with short stints in the legal and engineering fields.
But a real change was that after school, Jones started working for the NFL in video scouting.
“I always thought I wanted to be in professional sports, one way or another,” he explains. “But I fell out of love with it. When you work in something that you admire, sometimes the reality is a lot different than what you thought it was.”
After coming to that realization, he took a job at an engineering design firm and learned the ins and outs of designing buildings and electrical systems. He fell in love with the design aspect of it all.
Richard Jones
“I think some of the best innovation and efficiency and creativity is gained when you don’t have tight constraints on your team. You provide a vision and mission, and guidance and support when needed.”
“A couple of years into that, I liked what I was doing, and realized I wanted to see the end product, so I became more interested in professional construction,” Jones says. “That’s when I took a position at Siemens.”
What he learned there was that he wanted to be on the owners’ side and bring value to a company without having to sell something; he wanted to lend business sense and technical know-how.
That led Jones to Heartland Dental, where he came in as an associate manager on the construction side and rose through the company over the last five years to his current directorial position. “When I started, they had just brought in new leadership and under the guidance of Mike Rolves, senior director of design, construction, and facilities, I was given the trust and freedom to create value where [I] saw it could be created,” Jones says.
Heartland Dental was a large but still very young company, and Jones was impressed by its aspirational goals. He knew it would be the challenge of a lifetime.
“There was so much value to be created; they were really great at what they were doing, but it needed scalability,” he says. “They didn’t have a design function. It was each project manager doing everything from entitlement to construction.”
Early in his time with the company, Jones was tasked with helping draft contracts, doing drawing reviews, and had his share of grunt work. He put his head down and did that to the best of his ability.
Jones knew that the company had the capacity to increase business from 30 builds to 100 builds a year, and was instrumental in making that happen, getting the opportunity to do much, much more.
“The value I brought with my experience, I was chosen to start the design team,” he shares. “This past year [in 2023], the responsibility of the construction function then folded under my team as well. We’re able to put our fingerprint on the process and really do something.”
He’s raised the design standards, helped grow the bench from 2 architects up to 12 different firms to assign work to, and was given a larger team to work with when the company consolidated things in 2022.
Today, Jones is responsible for all building retrofits, which often involves converting banks and restaurants to dental clinics, as well as standalones and other spaces.
“One of the things we pride ourselves on is it doesn’t matter what the real estate is, we’ll find a way to turn it into a dental clinic,” he says. “We’re extremely flexible in what we can and can’t do. I don’t think we’ve come across a challenge that we’ve said ‘no’ to ever.”
“One of the things we pride ourselves on is it doesn’t matter what the real estate is, we’ll find a way to turn it into a dental clinic.”
Richard Jones
AI is starting to make a big push in design, and Jones says that tech in general is becoming even more important today than it ever has.
“You always want to provide as much space and infrastructure as possible for the people who know the dental practice to be able to plug-and-play things, whether that’s providing redundant electrical systems or multifunction areas so our dental professionals can expand their offerings,” Jones says.
A notable thing Jones has done recently is implementing modular design standards to expedite the design process and make it more rapid. “That was a huge factor of ours,” he says. “In order to make the process quicker, we broke everything down into Lego-size pieces. They really present an opportunity for team members to take on something that is outside the norm.”
Jones subscribes to a “gardener leadership style,” which provides resources to his team in order for everyone to flourish. That team comprises four design managers, a senior design manager, and five construction managers.
“I like to treat everyone like they’re adults,” he shares. “I think some of the best innovation and efficiency and creativity is gained when you don’t have tight constraints on your team. You provide a vision and mission, and guidance and support when needed. If you’re hiring the right people and coaching them the right way, you don’t need to suffocate them with mandates. You need to give them space to figure out things in an organic way.
“The core group we hired on has stuck around; they feel appreciated and valued, and have the freedom to explore and take risks,” he says. “That and the fact we have scaled in a way that we thought we could five years ago. The structure we put in place works, and at the end of the day, that’s really incredible.”
Identiti has been a proud signage partner for Heartland Dental over the last decade as they have grown from a couple of hundred locations to over 1,700 sites. Each unique location requires a custom exterior sign package, including sign specifications and design. Every year, we complete hundreds of projects consisting of denovos, rebrands, and refreshes. We are more than just their signage provider; we are an extension of their organization and a valued partner.
