Page 14 - BusinessWest February 20, 2023

“We just talked, and it became apparentthatwe hadalotofthe same ethos to the way we live life.”
er on nights and weekends. With an old-school approach, his father would only use hand tools, milling and block planing the wood himself. This work ethic was entrenched in him and his brother from the start.
By age 16, Lawrence-Slavas had been working for a few years helping his father untilhisdaddecidedhewasgoingtobemoreconsciousaboutwhatprojectshe could take on, both physically and time-wise.
“At that point, I started branching myself off and looking,” he recalled. “I know I loved the trades. I loved working with my hands, and I didn’t have a lot of experi- ence other than post-and-beam building. I started to get more of a feeling for the commercial work in that time of my life, understanding more about the owner dynamic. And that part of it kind of intrigued me.”
He packed his bags after graduating high school and moved to Colorado to work in the trades. When he got there, he had to work on things “you don’t necessarily want to do to make it work.”
He told BusinessWest that experience taught him a lot about resilience, self- motivation, responsibility, and the need to network. “I didn’t have the option to look at my feet when I talked out there. I really had to be engaging and build myself.”
Still, as he progressed in Colorado, he felt the work was not where he wanted to be, and that he was having a “midlife crisis at 25 years old.”
He was building gorgeous homes, he explained, but they were being used only for a short amount of time during the year, and most of them were energy-ineffi- cient. With internal conflict growing, he questioned whether what he was doing was something he felt good about, and that was the catalyst for creating a new goal. So he decided to move back to New England, where he met his wife, who pushed him to go back to school.
Lawrence-Slavas attended UMass Amherst for his bachelor’s degree, and the university offered him a master’s track in building and construction technology, in which he worked with the school on creating local initiatives to increase financial gain in the region by using low-value wood, like white pine and hemlock.
Once he started looking for work outside of UMass, Lawrence-Slavas had a chance meeting with Wright.
“We just talked, and it became apparent that we had a lot of the same ethos to the way we live life,” he explained. “I’m a very different person than he is, but we had the same underlying principles to the way we work and the way we see things.”
As noted earlier, he started at Wright Builders as a project-development engi- neer, but Wright noticed that “it wasn’t my passion at all,” Lawrence-Slavas said.
He added that he’s always been able to manage people because he can connect
Seth Lawrence-Slavas says he found in Wright Builders a company that shares his values and ethos.
ARCHITECTURE PLANNING INTERIOR DESIGN
Mountain View School Easthampton MA
Photography: Leigh Chodos
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