Taking the Long View

St. Rita’s Medical Center in Lima, Ohio, served as the birthplace of Ryan Sawall’s McCarthy career and his family.

In 2005, the newly minted project engineer was laboring on the hospital’s new nine-story patient tower while his wife, Amanda, occupied a nearby patient room to give birth to their first daughter, Megan. “I was coordinating steel deliveries while my wife was delivering a baby,” he laughs, noting that he’d arranged for Amanda to secure a room overlooking the jobsite. A couple of years later, she returned to the same hospital to give birth to daughter No. 2, Kaylin. 

Fast forward two decades and Sawall has ascended to CEO of McCarthy’s 28-state Central Region. He's part of a recently appointed leadership team of long-term McCarthy partners that includes Regional President Chris Anvik, Regional Chief Operating Officer Doug Mangers and St. Louis Business Unit Leader Josh Gaghen. 

Sawall’s purview includes McCarthy offices in St. Louis, Kansas City and Omaha, where teams are managing a wide array of projects spanning the healthcare, education, science & technology, commercial and industrial sectors. They’re also working in partnership with other McCarthy regions to deliver jobs in the national specialty markets of water/wastewater, renewable energy and mission critical facilities.

It's that diversity of expertise, Sawall says, that will continue propelling McCarthy’s Central Region forward. “We continue to be in a booming market, and what's in front of us is very, very exciting” he says. 

Looking toward the future, Sawall is prioritizing the company’s ability to stay focused on its clients while remaining nimble. “We need to continue looking up and out at what's coming our way and investing in the business so we can continue to provide great outcomes for our clients and a great place to work for our employee-owners,” he says. “Across the organization, we're investing in AI and other technology to make sure that we continue to lead the industry and serve our clients in the best way possible.”

On a weekly basis, Sawall connects with his four regional CEO peers to share insights and provide support to each other. “They've been great mentors to me, which has made my job so much easier to have them to lean on and learn from,” he says. He also connects weekly with McCarthy’s 10-person Executive Committee and leverages the knowledge of former Regional CEO and President John Buescher, who has transitioned to a new companywide role as a senior-level adviser.

Engineered for Building

Sawall’s introduction to the construction industry came while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. “I was paying for college myself, so I worked full-time at a local roofing company,” he says. “As part of the project management and sales team, I got my feet wet in construction and also learned that I had a lot to learn.”

At a campus recruiting fair, he met former McCarthy Quality Director Bill Nash, who was in town visiting his daughter and volunteered to recruit at the nearby engineering school during his visit. “I was pretty lucky to connect with Bill,” he notes. “From the very start, it was the people that attracted me to McCarthy, and that’s still what excites me most about the organization moving forward.”

After signing on with McCarthy in 2005, Sawall gained hands-on project management experience at jobsites across the U.S. and also earned his professional mechanical engineering license. His relocation to St. Louis in June 2023 was his 10th move with the company.

Sawall briefly left McCarthy in 2013 to lead the Milwaukee office of a construction startup before returning to the company the following year to lay the foundation for a permanent Omaha office. Under his guidance, that office expanded from two people to over 100 and continues to thrive.

Other highlights of Sawall’s McCarthy career include earning the ENR national Project of the Year award as well as the internal Roger Burnett Award for the Omaha VA Ambulatory Care Center project. “Expanding healthcare resources for Omaha’s veterans community was a labor of love for the entire design and construction team,” he says. “We put so much effort into making sure that we had the right team in place and into building trust, and that paid off tenfold.”

In his current role, Sawall welcomes every opportunity to hang out with his McCarthy partners in the field. “The best part of my job is visiting jobsites and seeing the cool things that our talented people are doing,” he says. “It’s awesome.”

As Sawall considers McCarthy’s future, he’s excited about what lies ahead. “As an organization, we've come so far in the last 10 years, and it's exciting to think about what’s possible in the next 10 years,” he says. “The future looks incredibly bright.”