Editor’s Note: Jane Page was a finalist for 2012 Contractor of the Year. She and her former husband started Page & Associates in 1979 in Johnson City, Tennessee. The company has 25 employees with annual volume of $3 million to $5 million. The company serves the site development, general construction, utilities and curbing and sidewalks markets.
The entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in the Page family. As a child, Jane Page saw her parents run a clothing store and then a sandwich shop. After her father died, her mother became the first female insurance agent in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And when Jane got married, she and her husband did it all – from delivering advertising circulars to peeling potatoes for commercial salad makers to maintaining rental properties.
“I knew I had to work hard to get what I wanted and what I wanted was a hearth and home,” Jane says. But don’t let this grandmother of eight fool you. She’s got a core of steel beneath a Southern graciousness, a determination that’s been tested in the recent downturn. “We’ve had to get creative because I’ve never seen it as bad as this … and we were here in the early 1980s,” she says. “Usually, when something’s down, of our other businesses is doing OK. This time, everything was down.”
When Jane says “everything,” she means it, because she’s still got her hand in several businesses, including Page & Associates, a construction firm that has its roots in a company she and her former husband started in 1979. In addition to the construction company, she also has residential and commercial property management businesses.
With so much on her plate, Jane is grateful her son Bud and daughter Mary Jane Scott have assumed many of her day-to-day duties, positioning her firm for the next generation.
Throughout the years, Jane’s construction firm built houses and commercial buildings and has found a more recent niche in sewer and water municipal and site development jobs. “We do whatever is in front of us,” Jane says. “Getting bonding is gigantic and we do get bonded. I think they like our integrity, assertiveness and our stick-to-itiveness. We finish it. If it takes all night, we buy pizzas for everyone and do it. And we rest and laugh later.”
