Before McRae Enterprises, there was a sandbox.
Micah’s father remembers it: his son and a few friends, dump trucks and backhoes everywhere, bridges and buildings going up in the sand. Micah was the one running it. His dad remembers thinking: here’s this little boy running a whole construction project, and everyone is having a great time.
Twenty years into McRae, not much has changed. Micah is still the one organizing the work, and having fun. The difference is that now he has a team of experts, and the buildings are real.
From sketchbook to headquarters
His father taught him something else in those years, and Micah built the company on it:
Treat your customers like business partners, and take their needs as seriously as your own.
He still says it almost the same way today: “We genuinely look at our clients as partners.”
That lesson became the standard the whole team works to: the same excellence on every job, for every customer, every time. Brad Jones, one of our project managers, puts it this way:
“Relationships come and go, but partnering goes deeper than that. It’s the customer or trade partner knowing that there’s a ton of variables in a total project package, but McRae isn’t one of them.”
Brad Jones, Project Manager
By high school, the sandbox had turned into a sketchbook. In English class, when he was supposed to be paying attention, Micah was drawing a corporate headquarters: the doors, the office layout, the shelving, even the break room.
In 2006, while working as a site foreman on high-end homes, he bet on himself and started McRae.
On Thursday, October 23, 2025, the team cut the ribbon on that headquarters at 4215 Earnings Way and filled the shop with the customers, partners and friends who have been part of this story. Members of our team took the stage that night and told the McRae story in their own words.
What nobody sees
At the CRS headquarters in Jeffersonville, the soil couldn’t hold a building on its own. Before anything went up, our team drove 45 micropiles into the ground. Nobody will ever see them. The whole building stands on them.
Some of the most important work at McRae happens the same way, out of view.
Rob Marconi does a lot of it. Customers rarely see the budgets, forecasts and funding behind a project, but none of it moves without them. When McRae needed a CFO, Rob was the CFO. When it needed a project manager, he ran projects. Micah has worked with him for nearly fifteen years and calls him “entirely the glue that holds our company together.”
Samantha McRae, Micah’s wife, backed this company when it was running out of the family’s home office, and she has backed it every year since. Micah calls her his ultimate partner.
Today the team runs from the office to the jobsite, and Micah will tell you it’s his greatest professional pride. He sets the bar high on purpose: “It’s not for everyone. But if you can make it here, you’re in an elite class.” Character and integrity are non-negotiable.
I started with about nothing. But I’ve found a family.
Micah McRae, to the team
I’ve cried with some of you. But I’ve also laughed with you too.
We make fun of everyone. But we’re always there for each other.
Rothrock tells bad jokes. But we laugh anyway.
To our team: so much of what you do will never show up in a project photo. But it shows up in the way our jobs run, the trust our customers place in us and the way you show up for one another. You are the foundation we’ve been talking about.
Where our work lives
Students at Prosser train for their careers in a lab we built. In Shepherdsville, kids will learn to swim in a pool that sits on a foundation we put in the ground. In Sellersburg, officers start their shifts in a former office building this team turned into a police headquarters.
A patient walks into a clinical trial hoping for a cure, in a 1970s building we turned into a modern research center. A family in New Albany hands their dog to the surgeons at Latimer Animal Hospital and takes him home again.
At the Center for Women & Families, a little girl who has had the hardest year of her life climbs to the top of the slide and laughs. We built that playground for that moment.
Some projects we stay with long after the ribbon cutting. CRS is one of them. We developed its headquarters as a build-to-suit, topped it with a solar array that covers about 90% of its power and had CRS moved in less than ten months after we broke ground. We build every project as if we were going to own it. Sometimes we do.
Every set of drawings has someone behind it who has staked something real on the project: a business owner betting on growth, a school investing in its students, a community building a place it will use for decades.
“We came with an idea, and they brought it to life.”
Matthew Latimer, Latimer Animal Hospital
Long after we pack up the jobsite, the building lives on. That’s the part of this work we get to keep. We hire from here, most of our team has kids in local schools and youth sports, and when the river leaves driftwood on the fossil beds at the Falls of the Ohio, our crews show up with their equipment.
The next twenty years
Twenty years from now, people will be working, learning and gathering in the places we’re building today. Some of the students in schools we’ve worked on may be leading our crews. People on this team may be leading the business. And someone else will have the chance to look back and tell the story of what we built together.
How we build will change. New technology will change the work, and new ideas will challenge us to do it better. We’re already exploring what that could mean, from renewable energy to small modular nuclear reactors. There is more to learn, and we intend to keep learning.
Micah is proud to be the first generation and excited to see what the next will do. His advice is the same advice that brought us here: make the best decisions you can with the information you have, learn from your mistakes and keep moving forward.
What a long road it’s been so far. But what a magical journey yet lies in front of us.
Micah McRae
Thank you
Micah, twenty years ago, you took the chance. Since then, so many people have brought their skill, trust and hard work to what you started.
To every teammate who has taken pride in a job done right, every customer who has trusted us with something important, every trade partner who has worked beside us and every family who has supported the work: you helped make these twenty years possible.
When we look back, we see the projects. We also remember the people it took to build them. This anniversary belongs to you.
Before any of it, there was a boy in a sandbox who wanted to build—and knew how to bring people together to do it.
Twenty years in, that’s still the best part: what we get to build together.
Thank you for being part of it.
—The Team
Planning a project in Southern Indiana or Louisville? Let’s talk about a better way to build. Know someone who is? An introduction is the best compliment you can pay us.
Some of the people you’ll meet
