How to Grow a Construction Business: Three Lessons From Massachusetts’ Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year

By ICIC | October 29, 2026

Key Takeaways

• Hire with a process, not out of desperation. Structured hiring turned unreliable crews into a team Vicki can count on.
• Know your numbers. Financials, pricing, and markup are the first steps toward capital and bonding.
• Lean on people who’ve been there. Peers who’ve solved your problem can save you time and money.

Ask Vicki Gray what it means to be a changemaker, and she doesn’t talk about awards. She talks about people.

“It’s giving others the opportunity to make a change in their life,” she says. “Whether that’s a career, a new skill, or a new understanding. That’s how I make a change in my community.”

Vicki is the founder of New Chapter HI Services, a general contracting and remodeling firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, serving residential, commercial, and federal clients across New England. In 2026, the U.S. Small Business Administration named her its woman-owned Small Business of the Year for Massachusetts. She’s also an alumna of Building for Growth (BFG), ICIC’s executive education program for construction contractors.

A Business Built From a Broken Promise

New Chapter HI started with a contractor who disappeared.

Vicki’s mother immigrated from Barbados and, over the years, built a portfolio of rental properties. Vicki grew up as the family’s go-between with the plumbers and electricians who kept those buildings running.

Then her mother hired a contractor to renovate one of her units. He took a deposit of more than $20,000, gutted the apartment to the studs, and vanished. Watching her mother absorb that loss changed Vicki’s plans. In 2013, she launched New Chapter HI to give homeowners, especially women, a contractor they could trust to finish the job.

The problem hasn’t gone away. Her team has finished more than one abandoned job, including a Cambridge condo where a young family with a newborn and a toddler had been left without a working kitchen.

Moments like that keep Vicki focused on finishing what she starts. And the longer she’s been in business, the more she’s seen that a company people trust can do more than finish jobs. It can open doors.

Opening Doors for Young People and Women

New Chapter HI has partnered with the Associated General Contractors of Massachusetts and Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology to bring program graduates onto her team as interns, where they learn construction estimating.

“I’m able to give back to the community, help underserved youth further their education, and give them an insight into an actual small business in construction,” she says.

She also encourages young people, especially those not headed to college, to consider the trades and even business ownership. “I let them know they can be a success in construction,” she says.

For women entrepreneurs, she co-created the first Women of Color Summit with the Center for Women & Enterprise. “I could not hold that information in,” she says of what she’d learned about business finance in an ICIC session. “I needed to share it.”

Turning “Not Yet” Into Yes

When ICIC launched BFG, Vicki applied right away and missed the revenue threshold. “That hurt,” she says. “But I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I don’t ever give up.”

She attended an ICIC Alumni Network (ICAN) event in Boston, told the BFG team what happened, and went back to work with the pricing and markup lessons from the Inner City Capital Connections (ICCC) program in hand. A year later, she cleared the threshold and was accepted.

BFG combines 18 weekly classes, technical assistance, and long-term mentorship, at no cost to participants thanks to ICIC’s generous sponsors, with a focus on bonding, capital readiness, and relationships with prime contractors.

Three Takeaways Any Owner Can Use

By the time Vicki started BFG, she knew what was holding her back: access to capital, bonding capacity, and finding skilled, reliable workers.

ICIC’s programs gave her a way to tackle all three challenges. Here’s what she’d pass along to any owner facing the same ones.

Hire with a process, not out of desperation. For years, Vicki filled crews with family and friends of friends. “People wouldn’t show up. There was no real accountability,” she says. 

“BFG taught me how to build a real hiring process and a plan to keep the six W-2 employees I retain year-round.” 

New team members now go through screening interviews, reference checks, and skills assessments. “You gotta have the right people on your bus.”

Know your numbers. At ICCC, Vicki sat in the front row for a session on financial statements, pricing, and markup with Harvard Business School’s Steve Rogers. “You can’t run a business without understanding finance,” she says. BFG built on that foundation with coursework on bonding and capital readiness. As she puts it, “Access to capital and bonding live in the same house.” Today, New Chapter HI takes on larger residential, commercial, and federal projects, work that starts with knowing your numbers.

Lean on people who’ve been there. Vicki met with BFG classmates outside of class to swap payroll companies, insurance advice, and fixes for problems someone had already solved. “A lot of us go through the same exact problems,” she says. Through ICAN, that network has continued after graduation.

Why a Stronger Business Builds a Stronger Community

Structured hiring means steadier jobs for her crew and real training for her interns. Stronger financials mean bigger contracts, and bigger contracts mean more people working. “I wanted to make a significant impact in my kids’ lives, in my community, in my life,” Vicki says. “One of the fastest routes to that was entrepreneurship.”

If She Can Build It

Vicki’s long-term vision is a franchise model for women who don’t come from traditional construction backgrounds or have significant cash reserves. “I want young women to look at New Chapter HI Services, and at me, and believe in themselves,” she says. “You don’t need to know everything. If I could do it, you could do it.”

Build Your Next Chapter With ICIC

If you run a construction business and you’re ready to grow, learn more about Building for Growth and apply for an upcoming cohort. Not in construction, or not quite ready for BFG? Explore ICIC’s ICCC program, a strong first step for building capital readiness and growing revenue. Funders and partners who want to expand access to opportunity for entrepreneurs can partner with ICIC and help build generational wealth in more communities.