John Tocci
Title: Senior Vice President,
Chief Enabling Officer
Tocci Building Cos.
Age: 60
Experience: 39 years
The second thing you notice about the Tocci Building Cos. headquarters in Woburn is the property’s imposing wooden front door, because the first you take in is the structure’s looming façade of stone and brick. The building is actually an old ceramic tile manufacturing plant, designed and built in 1907. Walking into the building, the visitor is struck by the arches flying overhead in the cathedral ceilings before noticing the intricate tile artistry lining the arches. The building’s history is certainly not lost on John Tocci, who is now the third generation of his family to hold the company helm. The firm was founded in 1922 by his grandfather, Giovanni Tocci, a skilled Italian mason who immigrated to the United States in 1917.
Q: We were discussing the building’s history. Can you talk about it in more detail?
A: The building was taken over by a local small developer when the tile manufacturing company went out of business in the 1960s and put a bunch of different tenants in the building, everything from an inventor to a dance studio to Bruegger’s Bagels headquarters. They covered over all that ceramic tile that you saw downstairs. Nobody really understood what had been here before. We restored all that after we bought the building in 1999.
Q: Now that we’ve covered that, can we talk about your personal history in the business? How have things changed over the years you’ve been involved?
A: Back 10 or 12 years ago just prior to us buying this building, my four children were getting ready to go to college. Over the prior … 30 years of being in the business, I had progressively become more dissatisfied to the point where I was almost disgusted with the way the business of construction had evolved, a business that when I had started full-time in 1974, the architect was not an enemy to the process – he was your partner in the process. A lot of things have happened since then, the mid-70s to 1985 or 1990. The most prominent thing was that lawyers discovered the construction industry as fertile ground for litigation. More [division] happened between the construction and the design side. With that separation, there were a lot more change orders for projects due to mistakes because of the lack of cooperation. The quality dropped significantly. We were spending more time issuing self-serving documentation to protect ourselves than we were putting effort into actually building the projects. So, I told my kids that the business had gone to the dogs, and you should find another business to go into. I said I was going to shut it down because the industry had lost all of its nobility. The industry was in dire shape … and was filthy. Thirty-eight percent of carbon emissions in the U.S. currently are from operations and construction of buildings. The number of projects that actually make their original schedule and original completion date and original budget is less than 30 percent. We are a terrible industry at being promise keepers.
Q: Well, that was sufficiently depressing. It’s all important information to have, but how does it get fixed?
A: It was the discovery of building information modeling (BIM) and integrated project design (IPD), which has led to a more collaborative way of doing business and streamlined the process. Since that time, we’ve become a leader, at least on the East Coast, of implementing BIM, IPD and virtual design and construction. The Chinese government brought us to Beijing and Shanghai, and the U.K. brought us to London, to help them develop their standards and processes with those methods. When we discovered BIM as a 3-D design tool … we could now get into the design and fix it, to see where materials weren’t connecting properly, before the project is built. Then you don’t have all the change orders and the ensuing arguments. That’s what was really draining me and the industry … the constant acrimony. Now we have this powerful design tool that eliminates the waste and problems that can occur on the jobsite.
