Jennifer Beattie’s leadership chops were forged in the fires of the Great Recession.
At that time, she was the youngest of four owners being considered for leadership by the founder and president of Commercial Industrial Design Architecture.
“She was determined for CIDA to survive, to keep our staff employed, to keep the lights on and our doors open,” firm principal architect Chris Walker said in her nomination. “When the economy was in freefall with no indication of finding the bottom, Jennifer’s unshakeable determination and unrelenting nature to do right by her employees and her clients kept CIDA afloat.”
Jennifer took the helm as CIDA’s new president in 2013. Since then, she has expanded its services and sectors, consistently adapted to market pressures and led CIDA to its highest revenue in its 30-year-history in 2021, despite a global pandemic.
Now, as she adapts to hybrid leadership with her team, Beattie continues to look to the future, anticipating continued supply chain issues and preparing a strategy around that.
“Commodity pricing, delays, material availability, those are all going to hamper our growth,” she said. “Covid has been horrible. There’s a lot of manufacturing pieces that are just so far behind, where they are running at 100% capacity. They’re not delivering product when we need product for construction.
“So we’re redesigning buildings all the time, redesigning products all the time, to what we can get. From a strategy standpoint, what we do now is really talk about short-term supply requirements, and … maybe those get ordered well before the building is actually designed. It’s a risk, but there’s a lot of reward.”
On Oregon’s child care crisis: “It’s not over, because daycares are not running normal hours. So you can’t expect employees and staff to be in at any place. I can’t drop off my son until 8 a.m. That means I can’t be in a meeting until 8:30 a.m., unless I join in the car. We’re not back to whatever normal is. Not until we fix daycare. We will not be back.”
On her leadership philosophy: “I’m a communicator, a collaborator, empowering person. I want everybody to succeed. I’m going to try to do everything in my power to make sure they succeed.”
On her greatest adventures: “I sailed through the Caribbean. I’ve lived and studied in Copenhagen. I’ve traveled through Europe, and I’ve traveled through Japan. And the thing that probably shapes me the most is that I lived off grid for 10 years. I adopted both my boys, which I am incredibly proud of. I have done cattle drives on a working ranch by horseback.”
