Ryan Bird
Project Executive
Ryan can be described as the kind of guy that loves a challenge and loves bringing it all together, you'll see what we mean. He's the son of a mom from a big Italian family and an Englishman whose parents came to the new world in search of the American dream. These two factors echo throughout his own life story. He grew up on the North Shore of Mass and played high school football at St. Johns in Danvers which eventually took him to the University of Maine.
He has made his way to where he is now on the Leadership Team of Optimum by a steady diet of increasingly difficult challenges as well as training and experience in every side of the construction industry. At UMaine, where he met Optimum founder Kendrick Ballantyne on the football field, he studied Business Administration and Construction Management. From there he got his start in the construction industry with a pipe fitting company, helping build power plants. This was right after everything real estate tanked in '08. Here he got to see construction in the field seeing how the work is done as well as the office side.
Since then he has taken on bigger challenges in commercial property construction and management. He spent years on the South Shore in multi-family/use property construction. Along the way he has done coursework in architecture at Boston Architectural College, project and risk management at Northeastern U., plan reading and estimating at Wentworth Institute of Technology. . . . you get the idea. The guy's insatiable. Most recently he's been back at his alma mater, managing a huge rework and expansion of their athletic facilities. This has given him the owner/operator's perspective of commercial real estate. It also gave him the chance to return to his hometown and to be nearer to family.
What gets him going most is bringing together all the different elements that it takes to pull off big projects. You have to take so many pieces and people and get them to work together towards one goal. Plans, budgets, schedules, relationships, different companies and organizations all need to come together. The different players all bring unique goals and priorities. Everybody has to be onboard and heading in the same direction. This takes him back to the athlete mentality from his football days, working as a team. You have to be focused, come up with a plan, and make things happen. That's what he gets up for in the morning.
Well, that's not the only thing he gets up for. He has 3 kids and a rock-solid wife that make up his primary team. When he's not pushing Optimum's business forward in Massachusetts he's getting outside with the kids, connecting with the world around him, and finding ways to keep fit and away from the computer screen. As we said, it's all about family and keeping himself engaged and challenged. We're lucky to have him pouring his energies into our team at Optimum.