The product is almost impossible to love. Gravel. Asphalt. Rebar. A well being drilled in some field you will never visit. A bridge that, if everything goes right, you cross without a single thought. This is the raw material Erin Kuhlman works with every day, and her job is to make you care.
Kuhlman is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Granite Construction, one of the largest heavy-civil contractors in the United States. The company is based in Watsonville, California, a coastal town better known for strawberries than for a public company with roughly 5,800 employees and multibillion-dollar revenue. From there, Granite builds and rebuilds the roads, bridges, tunnels, and water systems that most people only notice when they stop working.
Explaining that kind of company is a strange assignment. The better the work, the less anyone sees it. A commute that is boring. A pour that sets clean. A bridge that simply holds. Kuhlman has spent more than 30 years learning to build a brand around exactly that sort of quiet.
Marketing usually attaches itself to things you can hold, wear, or scroll. Kuhlman went the other direction. Her career sits inside construction, infrastructure, and materials - transportation, environmental, defense, technology, and industrial programs. These are enormous industries that almost no one explains well, which turns out to be the opportunity.
Every overlooked sector is a wide-open field for anyone who can actually tell its story. There is no hype cycle to fight, no noise to cut through, just real work and a public that mostly takes it for granted. Kuhlman figured that out early and built a whole career there, moving between some of the biggest names in engineering and construction.
Her product is something most people stand on, drive over, or drink from every day - and never think about once.
Before Granite, Kuhlman spent more than seven years at Parsons Corporation, the engineering and technology firm with deep roots in defense and infrastructure. She joined Parsons in 2012 as Vice President of Corporate Relations, and by 2018 had become Corporate Vice President of Marketing and Communications. It was a run that took her work across the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East.
In 2019 she moved to Granite. On paper it reads like a lateral step - one infrastructure giant to another. In practice it was a reset. Granite is a company approaching its second century, with a famously safety-first culture and a workforce that pours concrete, drills wells, and runs quarries. Kuhlman had to learn to speak to all of them at once, and to the investors and reporters watching from the outside.
The part of the job most people underestimate is the audience math. A chief communications officer at a company like Granite is not writing one message. She is writing for the crew on a job site at dawn, the analyst on the quarterly call, and the reporter with a deadline - and all three have to hear the same story.
That is harder than it sounds. Most communicators can do one audience well. The rare ones hold all of them at the same time, so that the safety record the field is proud of and the numbers the market cares about are two faces of a single, consistent message. Kuhlman's remit runs the full width of it: brand strategy, media relations, strategic and crisis communications, digital and employee communications, and creative services.
Kuhlman's education hints at why she fits an industry this technical. She earned a BA in international management from Claremont McKenna College in California, then did postgraduate coursework in contract administration and accounting at UCLA. That is an unusual grounding for a marketing chief - most come up through creative or media, not the fine print of how deals actually get built.
It is a useful seam to sit on. Heavy-civil work lives in contracts, schedules, and risk. A communications leader who can read that language, and then translate it for a crew or a camera, is worth more than one who only knows the slogan. In a company that runs on precision, she brings the same instinct to the words.
The most specialized the world gets, the more it needs the person who can sit at the seam.
Construction has a hard truth built into it: the biggest reputational moments are the bad days. That is why safety is not just an operations metric in this business - it is a brand. A strong safety culture is something a communications team can carry outward with genuine pride, and it is the thing that has to be protected when something goes wrong. Crisis communications, in other words, is not a side skill in Kuhlman's world. It is close to the center of it.
Much of Granite's workforce is on a job site, not at a laptop, which makes internal communication its own challenge. Reaching thousands of people spread across states, projects, and shifts - and making them feel like one company - is a quieter craft than any press release. It is also where a nearly century-old contractor either keeps its identity or loses it.
Today Kuhlman is a steady presence on LinkedIn, amplifying Granite's project milestones and workforce culture under the company's team banner - a bridge project here, a safety recognition there, the people behind the work up front. It is a fitting register for someone whose whole career argues that the best stories in infrastructure are not loud.
Granite builds the physical connective tissue of American life. Kuhlman builds the other kind - the words, the trust, the reputation that let a large, dispersed company move as one and keep the public's confidence. It is unglamorous, essential work, and after three decades she has made a quiet specialty of it.