“He’s not the most loquacious person in the world,” notes a longtime colleague of Miller Gorrie, founder of Birmingham, Ala.-based contracting heavyweight Brasfield & Gorrie, just prior to Gorrie’s interview with ENR.
And it’s true that Gorrie is remarkably self-effacing for someone who has, over his career from age 28, used his life savings—all $45,000 of it—to jump-start his own construction firm and then grown it into one of the region’s largest and most successful contractors. With more than 2,600 employees working across the Southeast as well as Texas, Brasfield & Gorrie has earned the respect of competitors and clients alike.