Minority/Women Business Enterprise 2020 Annual Report

Success Stories

MINORITY/WOMEN BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

It was an innovative idea meant to increase City engagement with minority-owned businesses: hire an on call construction manager. That request for qualifications (RFQ) led to millions of dollars worth of City work for C2 Contractors, a certified minority-owned (MBE) and historically underutilized business (HUB). It also spurred a new joint venture for the firm, that President and CEO CC Lamberth expects to dramatically expand the business. “The real story is the City made one decision – to put an RFQ on the street that C2 could respond to – but the impact was exponential,” Lamberth says. In 2020, the City sought to hire its first on call construction manager, knowing that having a ready contractor in that role would save City departments time on projects and that many local M/WBEs were capable of doing the work. The five-person RFQ evaluation panel considered a wide range of criteria, including each firm’s past performances and its history of hiring M/WBE subcontractors. “It was a competitive process,” Assistant City Manager Kimberly Sowell says. C2 outranked seven competitors, including big names in the NC construction market. After C2 won the contract, competitors started calling. “When we lost out, we said, ‘We need to be talking to CC. Obviously he is doing something right,’” said Peyton Fairbank, vice president of HICAPS, a Greensboro-based One Decision, Exponential Impact

project management company with offices and field locations in the southeast and midwest. Lamberth, a NC A&T State University alumnus, started the construction and cabling company with his father 25 years ago. Today you can see the small business’ work across the state, including locally at the Union Square Campus and the new NC A&T Engineering Research and Innovation Center. The two firms formally launched HICAPS/C2, a joint venture for which Lamberth has 51 percent ownership. In December, it was formally state-certified as a HUB. They’ve already started bidding on work. “We are excited about the opportunities,” Fairbank says. “Doors seem to be opening for us.” “We now have bonding capacity of $56 million,” Lamberth said. “The City, in one single opportunity, with one single decision, changed diversity in one city and across this state.” Lamberth credits City Manager David Parrish and Sowell. “There has been a huge shift in how the City does business, and that is as a result of (their) leadership,” Lamberth says.

4