This Harvard-trained, ex-Uber lawyer is the boss at one of Philly’s biggest builders

Construction is often a family business. Mike Lloyd, as a Harvard Law graduate, former Wall Street trader, past counsel for Uber and Chevron, and a native of south Louisiana, had a first-class outsider’s resume when he arrived at Malvern-based IMC Construction, one of the mid-Atlantic’s largest general contractors.

But Lloyd is family, too: In 2017, engaged to the boss’ daughter, he took over as IMC’s general counsel, and moved onto a new career path that added his professional and personal skills to IMC’s career construction managers.

Since 2023 he’s been president and the firm’s controlling owner. On his watch, IMC revenue has risen more than 70%, to $600 million, and it has added offices and clients in New Jersey and Delaware, with more planned. The firm, founded in 1976, now employs 300, plus dozens of subcontracted crews at any given time.

Jobs that IMC built or rebuilt in recent years include Penn and Jefferson medical projects, Prologis warehouses in Marcus Hook, the post-Morgan Lewis tower at 2222 Market St., the new Merck and WuXi AppTec biotech plants in Delaware, Market Street in Philadelphia, apartments at the Granite Run Mall, the Promenade at Upper Dublin, the King of Prussia Town Center, and more than 100 other area sites.

Lloyd recently spoke with The Inquirer at IMC’s Chester County headquarters and on a tour of its nearby Great Valley Apartments complex, for developer Greystar. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Rob Cottone [his predecessor as IMC CEO] recognized he needed support to help the organization grow across the Mid-Atlantic.

This business is hand-to-hand combat every day. Every day is different.

What I bring to the table is my broad skill set. I’ve worked in finance. I’ve worked in law. I’ve worked in mergers and acquisitions, with big and small companies. I’m comfortable with financial companies, whether for IMC’s own work, or to help the building owners get comfortable with the construction lenders.

I don’t pretend to know things I don’t. We build a team of specialists who complement each other.

Phil Ritter, a senior project manager, had the idea of creating a Special Projects division for jobs worth $5 million and under. You use a different pool of contractors, and a faster operating model, but you get the benefit of working for a large, efficient organization.

I worked on the business plan, and in 2020 he started it, with maybe a million dollars in revenue that year. In three years, we were doing $30 million. We had a tremendous success doing small projects for Penn Medicine and Jefferson and others.

Many companies would not have put a top project executive in charge of a new business. It costs overhead while working on a business plan. But that’s how we invest in people.

We opened in 2022 in Edison, N.J., with four employees. We are now 37 there, of our 300 total, with $210 million in projected revenue for 2026. Our biggest job is the Crossings at Brick Church in East Orange, a transit-oriented multifamily development for Triangle Equities.

The labor is driven by the clients’ demands. As a general contractor, we are a merit shop [using both union and non-union contractors]. Our jobs are often 100% union, not always.

Sometimes we do jobs for a lump-sum price, sometimes open-book, guaranteed-maximum, the approach pioneered by Buck Williams [who founded IMC in 1976]. It takes a lot of working with the owners.

We see a tremendous amount of suburban apartment demand.

A lot of these are places where people can avoid going to the city, when you can have a nice dinner and do some retail shopping close to work, close to home. You have that in King of Prussia, you are getting it in the Great Valley, you will see more of it at the Navy Yard, and in Ardmore.

We recently broke ground at 100 Lancaster in Ardmore for Radnor Property Group, and the Great Valley Apartments we’re building for Greystar. You have a demographic of millennials who are finally getting married and moving out of the city as they have kids.

We survived COVID by completing over six million square feet of warehouses. We have turned over nearly 5,000 apartment units since the year before I joined, which should make IMC one of the largest apartment builders in the Philadelphia region. We have turned over 1,700 senior-living units over the past five years, which makes IMC the largest builder of senior living units [around Philadelphia.]

I don’t know that offices have peaked. I’m actually bullish on office construction. We’re completing our rebuild of 680 Swedesford Rd. [in Wayne], for example. Employers want to get their people back together. There’s benefits for collaboration and connection.

But they want higher-quality space. More light and amenities. They want a kind of ecosystem, like you see at the Navy Yard, where Ensemble is investing in life sciences. They have labs, offices, apartments, and amenities.

At the King of Prussia Town Center, the retail draws people in, and they’re building offices around it. You see a similar trend in the Great Valley. Historically there was this corporate office campus, now there are restaurants, hotels, apartments all around.

We are part of a $100 million lab project in Delaware. We did Penn’s Center of Healthcare and Technology in Center City. We built the Radnor outpatient center — it’s a model. We built their facility in Chesterbrook. And the hospitals are still building.

We are now one of the largest minority-owned contractors [in the country]. We don’t distinguish ourselves by being a minority contractor; we aspire to be the leading general contractor in the Mid-Atlantic region by leveraging technology in unique ways and creating solutions to serve our clients’ needs.

We happen to be a minority-owned company. I personally care about expanding opportunities. We have broadened the subcontractor pool and awarded $1 billion of subcontracts to minority- and women-owned businesses.

We have not felt much backlash or reversal. Many owners still feel committed to expanding the contractor pool. In the current administration it may need to be structured differently.

Our children are young. My daughter has already told me she wants to build her own house, and I can live in it if one day we were working together.