Page 20 - BusinessWest February 3, 2025

Chairman of the Boards
Marois Construction Completes a Transition at the Top
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
[email protected]
When asked why he left work as an insurance adjuster to start his own construction business, Joe Marois gave an answer as direct as it was insightful.
“It was a conscious decision to do something on my own so I wouldn’t have anyone to blame if I was a failure,” he told Business- West. “In the corporate world ... I played that game for a while, but I wasn’t going to try to rely on someone when I was older, waiting for that promotion; I couldn’t deal with that.”
A half-century of change and economic ups and downs later, ‘failure’ is certainly not a word that comes to mind when assessing not only Marois Construction, but also his other ventures, the Orion Farm equestrian centers — there are two, one in South Hadley and the other in Wellington, Fla. — and what could be called his com- mercial real-estate subsidiary as a self-storage business. Indeed, they are all success stories.
And now, 52 years after he got his start in his mother’s garage, Marois will be spending maybe a little more time with those latter two ventures.
Indeed, he is passing the torch of management at Marois Con- struction to Carl Mercieri, a 35-year employee of the company who, like Marois, got his start as a field carpenter and then worked his way up to estimating and eventually project management.
Mercieri will take the title of president, while Marois will serve as chairman of the board.
“It was a conscious decision to do something on my own so I wouldn’t have anyone to blame if I was
a failure. In the corporate world ... I played that game for a while, but I wasn’t going to try to rely on someone when I was older, waiting for that promotion; I couldn’t deal with that.”
Joe Marois, left, and Carl Mercieri.
Together, they plan to continue following the blueprint drafted in 1972, one of seizing opportuni-
Marois
Continued on page 22
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