CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Drive around the City of Chicago, and you'll likely see roads, buildings, streets, and bridges designed and constructed by Ardmore Roderick, one of the largest minority-owned engineering companies in the country.
But things started a lot smaller and quite humbly for President & CEO Rashod Johnson.
"I often tell people I like to play in the dirt, I just happen to get paid for it," he laughed. "So I was destined to be a civil engineer."
Johnson was born on the South Side of Chicago and grew up in Jackson Park.
"I graduated from St. Ignatius and then went to University of Illinois and studied civil engineering. I got my degree in structural engineering and then got my master in businesses at University of Notre Dame."
Johnson said it was after that he was finally ready to start his own company.
"I named it The Roderick Group, which is my middle name, Roderick. There was a market for a different look, a little diversity as it pertained to what engineering firm leaders look like, so I began to push the envelope there," he said.
His first project was a church on 66th and Martin Luther King Drive.
"The church was called New Beginnings. The pastor is a fraternity brother of mine and he had a wall behind his church that needed to be designed. It was a 'new beginning' in more ways than one for me and for Ardmore Roderick," he laughed.
That was in 2005. Soon enough he'd move into his first office space in the West Loop. Fifteen years later, the company has grown exponentially.
"It was just me in my attic at first. Now we have over 250 employees, six states and Puerto Rico. We are currently overseeing about $17 billion in construction work," he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Johnson joined forces with another engineering firm to form Ardmore Roderick.
"In 2017, I had a chance meeting with a woman named Cherryl Thomas, who owned Ardmore. I always say she chose me. We talked about acquisition. We put a deal together that was affordable for me to buy her, then, a 100 person firm," he said.
Johnson estimates he now has more than 500 jobs under his belt. Currently, AR is overseeing some of Chicago's largest infrastructure projects.
"We are on the joint venture prime team for the $8.5 billion O'Hare Airport expansion project called Ohare21. We're also one of the prime consultants running the program for Chicago Transit Authority's RPM project which is $2.3 billion and they are redoing the whole Red/Purple modernization," he said.
More than a week ago, the firm broke ground on the Obama Presidential Center.
"We're doing all the design work for the City of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Transportation to redesign all the roads. We're also doing construction management portion of it. We basically work for the Obama Foundation overseeing overseeing the whole project from a design and construction project."
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Johnson takes pride in his diverse team.
"We have some of the brightest engineers, architects, planners, construction professionals in the country," he said, the firm's diversity makes them unique.
"As an African American owned company, it would be remiss of me not to provide opportunities for people who don't have opportunities in this field. Fifty-seven percent of our company is diverse, very purposeful, 56 percent of our executive team is diverse, again very purposeful," Johnson said.
AR is now on the verge of going national, something Johnson hopes will redefine what an African American-owned national engineering firm looks like.
"One of the ways to do that, is to make sure that we are walking the talk about diversity, equity and inclusion," he said.
Ardmore Roderick is a full-service infrastructure engineering firm providing design, construction management, project/program management, and surveying services to public and private clients. For more information, log onto www.ardmoreroderick.com.