Local contractor Emerald Construction sold to employee trio

From left: Emerald’s new owners Ned Bowden, Rachael McKinney and Justin Kirby. (Courtesy Emerald Construction/BizSense graphic)

The torch has been passed at a longtime local general contracting firm. 

Emerald Construction was recently sold to employees Ned Bowden, Justin Kirby and Rachael McKinney, each of whom has worked for the company for around eight years.

The trio bought Emerald from Gib DeShazo, who had owned the company for more than a decade and will remain with the firm for at least the next year. 

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based at 2219 Dabney Road in Henrico, Emerald is a full-service GC that’s been active in the Richmond area since 1993, doing both upfits and renovations in existing buildings as well as ground-up new construction. 

Some of its work includes the Midas of Richmond that’s under construction in Church Hill, restaurant Brenner Pass’s space in Scott’s Addition and trucking firm Western Express’s headquarters expansion on Midlothian Turnpike. 

In the early 1990s, DeShazo was one of the first people Emerald’s founder, the late Ed Dee, hired to get the firm going. DeShazo left in 2003 to launch his own company that was later acquired by Emerald, and since 2012 he’d owned the company outright. 

Each of Emerald’s new owners brings with them different experience within the industry: Bowden joined the company in 2016 as a project manager and quickly became its director of business development; Kirby has been serving as a project executive; and McKinney is a professional engineer who’s been Emerald’s director of preconstruction since 2017. 

Discussions around the possible sale began a few years ago as DeShazo began to mull retirement. He said he was glad to make a deal with this group.  

“I think they’ll do a super job with the company. To be able to hand it off to them is a lot easier than if another company came in and bought it,” DeShazo said. “I’ve seen them grow over the years and for a lot of our clients, they are the face of Emerald.”

Gib DeShazo

The deal, which closed in July, was announced this week. DeShazo will continue to own Emerald’s office building on Dabney Road, where its staff of around 28 is based. 

Bowden, Kirby and McKinney said little will change with them at the helm. 

“It’s mostly maintaining the current sustained trajectory of the company,” Kirby said.

Though he no longer owns it, DeShazo will stay on at Emerald through 2025. He said he doesn’t know what he would do if he retired, and the new owners said they were glad he’ll be sticking around. 

“It’s good to have him here to teach us on the organizational decisions that are needed to be made to run the company –  all the things that we knew of, but we’ve never really been involved in before,” Kirby said. 

Added Bowden: “We’ll keep him as long as he wants to stay.”

In recent years Emerald has seen an uptick in healthcare projects, while also keeping a steady amount of office, industrial and retail work in its pipeline. The firm recently landed a notable office project in Innsbrook, where it has signed on to build out Owens & Minor’s new global headquarters.