John Schlobohm

Relentless Ally

Public Education Construction Paragon

Operations Director John Schlobohm drives excellence with relationships and personal care 

What does it take to build a K-12 and higher education Relentless Ally par excellence?

Ironically, in the case of 19-year veteran Operations Director John Schlobohm, it takes an operational leader who cut his teeth on a broad range of every other kind of project, from wood-framed multifamily housing to massive financial institutions. But on those jobs and in the years since, John has cultivated not just a commitment to construction excellence but a deep and abiding understanding of the things that really matter to our K-12 and higher education clients, both public and private alike.

With allies like Balfour Beatty and John on their side, our education clients rest assured that they’re receiving the very best – in scheduling efficiency, in budget maximization and in relationship prioritization.

Returning to the Mountains

After John completed his internship with Balfour Beatty (then known as Centex Homes, LLC), he made a quick pivot to our Carolinas commercial office team, building a massive facility for a major financial institution in Charlotte, North Carolina. While a powerful learning experience in the complexity of major renovations and upfits, John quickly jumped at the first opportunity for a more one-on-one, relationship-driven project.

As luck would have it, the project (and more to follow) was at his alma mater, Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, building the Center for Student Leadership Complex.

“Building a new dorm at Appalachian State was a formative experience, learning the ins and outs of public construction,” says John. “My wife and I were newlyweds and excited to move to the mountains for two years, but really, it laid an important foundation for understanding the priorities and needs of our public education clients.”

Residence Hall Renovations

From Boone, John returned to Charlotte, did a stint in ground-up apartment construction and soon returned to the world of higher education, this time at the University of North Carolina (UNCC) at Charlotte. There, he managed the renovation of Holshouser Hall while another Balfour Beatty team built a ground-up residence hall next door, and all in close proximity to another contractor’s project. Not long after, John would return to UNCC work to renovate Scott Hall in a very similar manner to the earlier Holshouser.

The site management complexity at Holshouser Hall called back to his corporate office experience, but tempered by his relationship-driven management style and commitment to UNCC’s schedule and budget priorities. No easy feat, when renovating a 1970s dorm hall with unreliable as-builts and significant complications including the discovery of asbestos and sections of crumbling structural concrete and other previously unknown conditions

“When renovating aging campus infrastructure, you may not know what you’ll find until the job is underway,” John says. “We always conduct extensive preconstruction reviews to iron out the scope as much as possible. We can look at it, get some binoculars on it, reach out and touch what we can and even use newer tools like laser scanning, but some unforeseen conditions can’t be discovered without demolition.”

The real challenge, then, is fitting any change of scope into the existing schedule and budget, both paramount concerns for publicly funded entities like a state university, and doubly so when the university is committed to having a residence hall ready for students by a set date.

“The process can be tedious and requires extensive documentation and ongoing work with design partners and vendors to accurately reflect any change orders necessitated by uncovered existing conditions,” John adds. “In the meantime, our team is still sequencing interior renovation work around exterior and structural repairs without impacting the schedule. Every change is a delicate balancing act.”

John and the Balfour Beatty team ultimately turned over Holshouser Hall on time while minimizing the overall budget impact of unforeseen conditions. So when they turned to Scott Hall’s renovation for UNC Charlotte - a nearly identical sister dorm built in the same period of the university’s history – they leveraged every scrap of knowledge gained on Holshouser to its fullest advantage.

“Based on what we learned from Holshouser Hall, we recommended and implemented a more extensive preconstruction process, assessing Scott Hall for the kind of damage we found prior,” John says. “With processes like concrete sounding, we started from a more accurate baseline.”

Even with concrete sounding in the team’s toolbelt, however, they still ran into existing conditions that didn’t match the building’s 1970s diagrams at all. At every step, our team both made the necessary renovations and repairs work within the project schedule and provided the university with a strong, accurate, clean record of construction on which they can base any future work.

The Relationship Remit

Throughout projects like the Holshouser and Scott Hall renovations, John is adamant that there is no replacement for fostering a collaborative and communicative client relationship. Jobs like these two residence halls and more simply wouldn’t be possible without it.

He operates in that Relentless Ally collaborative mindset at all times, but he truly jumpstarts the process on each project with a simple core idea: How can we help?

“Building a strong relationship with clients, especially our public higher education and K-12 clients, has to start with listening,” John says. “We listen to their needs, learn their priorities, needs and desires for a given project and we use that to write scopes that are as reliable as possible.”

Scope reliability doesn’t just translate to firm numbers for project stakeholders. It also best sets the project team up for success, even as teammates and trade workers may come and go throughout a project lifecycle. It creates a system and an environment of excellence, where quality standards and the core mission of the project are non-negotiable and subject to accountability, not just tied to the leadership of a single person like John.

“Over time, as with the difference between Holshouser Hall and Scott Hall, clients come to see how that relationship grows stronger and pays dividends from, project to project,” John adds. “We value our repeat clients so highly not out of convenience or ease, but because we all learn lessons together. We learn how our Relentless Ally mindset can best serve the client’s needs, which can be different for every school or university or project.”

Public Construction – the Balfour Beatty Way

As John looks ahead to an exciting public construction market, from K-12 schools to university facilities to state offices, he’s confident in his and Balfour Beatty’s unique ability to combine the advantages of relationship-driven collaboration with our resources as an international contractor.  

“In public construction, every dollar and every day counts more than ever. These are projects funded by our communities and for our communities, and our schools and public agencies depend on their completion,” John says. “We serve our clients best when we do what already comes naturally as part of the Balfour Beatty Way – investing the time, personal care and excellence required to build projects right, on time and at the best value.”