Executive vice president of the West region, Greg Skalaski, has been recognized by Los Angeles Business Journal as a Thriving in Their 40s honoree, selected as an outstanding market leader who elevates the Los Angeles business community through business success, leadership, and philanthropic commitment. Read the full Thriving In Their 40s feature here and learn more about why Skalaski was selected below.

Before he even moved to Los Angeles, Skalaski was already part of the city’s fabric, building some of the most iconic retail spaces including Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive. After working on projects in Los Angeles for 18 years and rising through the ranks at Shawmut to vice president of retail, Skalaski took the helm as executive vice president of Shawmut West at the end of 2018. In the newly-created role, he oversees the Los Angeles, Irvine, and Las Vegas offices, setting the strategy to ensure continued growth across all sectors in the region—hotel, restaurant, retail, commercial ground-up, tenant interior, sports venues and luxury residential—and ensuring executional excellence and technical expertise to exceed clients’ expectations.

In the first year under Skalaski’s leadership, the Los Angeles region specifically reached nearly $300M in revenue, driving a 260% increase in revenue over the past five years; also in that year, he drove the entire region’s revenue up 29% year-over-year. Skalaski has led the team to become even more embedded in the city’s growth and development, working on marquee projects including the restoration of a historic theater in DTLA, in-stadium work at SoFi Stadium, the adaptive reuse of historic buildings for Soho Warehouse and The Hoxton, DTLA, the relocation and renovation of House of Bijan, and projects supporting the revitalization of Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.    

With construction an essential service that has remained active throughout the pandemic, Skalaski has ensured the strict adherence to Shawmut’s enhanced safety protocols, new job-site innovations, and exhaustive risk assessment and response strategy to keep everyone on jobsites safe and mitigate the spread of the virus. This includes Shawmut’s own health screening platform, Shawmut Vitals, that checks for Covid-19 symptoms and manages contact tracing and Smartvid.io’s capability to detect social distancing violations through its AI machine. Skalaski has also partnered with clients to directly help them in their response to Covid-19. With news consumption at an all-time high and updates coming in constantly, he understands the critical need for clear, transparent, and consistent communication with employees to bring everyone together, from hosting virtual luncheons to gathering team members together (virtually) to celebrate successes.

Skalaski understands the crucial importance of supporting the community—he is a member of the Los Angeles Advisory Board for The Posse Foundation, a comprehensive and renowned college access and youth leadership development program.