Gary Smalley and the unfinished business of building

Gary Smalley had spent years close to the person running Tutor Perini. He knew the accounts, the company and the weight of a major construction contract. Yet when he became chief executive in January 2025, one feature of the job still caught him off guard: how much landed on his desk. It is a wonderfully ordinary discovery for someone entrusted with such conspicuously large things. Even a business that moves earth must move paperwork.

His route to that desk ran through audit work, international finance assignments and almost a decade inside Tutor Perini. He arrived as chief financial officer in September 2015, became president in November 2023 and succeeded Ronald Tutor on January 1, 2025. The promotion changed his vantage point. The responsibilities he had followed through the financial statements now belonged to him from the first bid through the finished job.

There is an appealing tension in that career. Construction makes itself visible. A station acquires a roof; a tunnel acquires a second end. Finance asks questions about work that may already be visible but has yet to be billed or paid. Smalley has spent much of his professional life where those two accounts of progress meet. His CEO story begins there, well before his name appeared beside the title.

The education behind the accounts

Smalley earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA at Northwestern University. His professional credentials include certified public accountant, certified fraud examiner and Chartered Global Management Accountant. They describe a career concerned with how a business records its activities, tests its assumptions and explains its results.

Before entering Fluor, he held audit positions with Ernst & Young and J.P. Stevens and Company. He joined Fluor in 1991 and remained for nearly 24 years. His financial management work took him through Australia, Chile, Mexico and the United States. That is a substantial stretch of professional life inside an engineering and construction business, with several national settings rather than a single corporate address.

In September 2002 he became Fluor’s vice president of internal audit. In March 2008 he moved into the senior vice president and controller role. From October 2014 he also served as chief financial officer for one of its business segments. The sequence matters: he had worked on examining the business, consolidating its financial picture and supporting a segment before taking the top finance position at another contractor.

Internal audit and a controller’s office provide different views of the same enterprise. One examines how processes and controls operate; the other helps assemble the financial account of what the business has done. A segment CFO works closer to the decisions of a particular operating business. Smalley’s progression through those roles gave him successive responsibilities within construction finance, years before a board asked him to take responsibility for an entire construction company.

The bill is part of the building

When Smalley joined Tutor Perini in 2015, the finance job extended into information technology and human resources. Those responsibilities put him in contact with the systems and people behind the figures. By 2017, when he was named a CFO Awards finalist, his work included improving accountability with business-unit presidents and controllers and tightening management reporting.

One particular concern was unbilled costs and unresolved change orders. The terminology is dry enough to require a glass of water. Its practical importance is easier to grasp. If work has changed and payment has not caught up, somebody needs to know where the matter stands. Better and faster reporting gives management a chance to address it while the details remain useful.

That early account of his responsibilities gives the later promotion some texture. The future CEO was already dealing with the distance between construction activity and financial recognition. It also helps explain why a contracting business might choose a finance executive to lead it. Delivering a structure and keeping the enterprise capable of delivering the next one are connected obligations.

A handover measured in months

The succession was put on a public timetable in November 2023. Smalley became president effective November 15, with the CEO change scheduled for January 1, 2025. Ryan Soroka was appointed senior vice president and CFO. The arrangement gave Smalley more than a year in the presidency before he assumed the chief executive’s responsibilities.

Ronald Tutor then moved into the executive chairman role, with service planned through 2026. He had led the combined company since the 2008 merger of Tutor-Saliba and Perini. Smalley’s appointment therefore changed the leadership of a business whose name, history and executive authority had long been closely associated.

The transition had a personal dimension as well as a corporate one. On taking over, Smalley thanked Tutor for his mentorship. Lead independent director Robert Lieber expressed the board’s confidence in the appointment. These were distinct relationships behind the same decision: a predecessor preparing a successor, and a board putting that successor in charge.

“The biggest surprise to me is the sheer volume of things coming across my desk.”Gary Smalley, on his first months as CEO, October 2025

His stated agenda at the handover was concrete: execute recent major project wins, return to profitability and pursue growth that would enhance shareholder value. It offered a useful order of operations. Work already won had to be carried out. The financial consequences would follow the quality and pace of that execution.

What a billion dollars looks like

Consider the Honolulu City Center Guideway and Stations project. Tutor Perini executed the roughly $1.66 billion contract and received notice to proceed in October 2024, while Smalley was president. Its announced scope included six rail stations and about three miles of elevated guideway, extending toward downtown Honolulu. Parsons was named design subcontractor.

The announcement anticipated substantial completion in 2030. That date gives the leadership change a different scale. A contract secured before Smalley became CEO was expected to occupy much of the following six years. The work crosses corporate reporting periods and executive anniversaries with little regard for either. Concrete has its own calendar.

In February 2025, a joint venture between Tutor Perini and Frontier-Kemper received an approximately $1.18 billion design-build award for the Manhattan Tunnel Project. The scope called for twin tunnels, about 700 feet long and 30 feet in diameter, beneath the Hudson River’s eastern shore, connecting to existing tunnels beneath Hudson Yards.

An access shaft at 12th Avenue and the West Side Highway was also part of the plan, intended eventually to become a ventilation facility. The announced substantial-completion target was 2029. Smalley’s new responsibilities thus had quite specific dimensions: a pair of large openings beneath Manhattan, with the engineering, coordination and financial management needed to deliver them.

The number that has to become work

The company entered this period with substantial commitments. At the end of 2024, backlog stood at $18.7 billion, after $12.8 billion of new awards during the year. Tutor Perini also generated $503.5 million of operating cash flow in 2024. Smalley was becoming CEO of a business with both a growing workload and a continuing need to collect the money attached to its work.

Backlog is useful precisely because it points forward. It represents contracted work remaining to be performed. Reading it as finished achievement would skip the part for which customers are paying. Smalley’s task is to move those commitments through construction, billing and collection over time, while the business continues to compete for suitable future projects.

During 2025, his first year as CEO, revenue reached approximately $5.54 billion and operating cash flow reached $748.1 million. Total debt fell by $126.8 million. Those are company results, produced across its operations and workforce. They also provide a measurable setting for the leadership transition: more activity, stronger cash generation and less debt at year-end.

The next reporting period extended the picture. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue was approximately $1.637 billion. First-half operating cash flow reached $334.1 million, while backlog was $19.9 billion at June 30. Management raised its full-year adjusted earnings guidance in August. The guidance was an expectation; the cash and revenue described work already recorded.

A longer horizon, and a modest quotation

Another part of that horizon lies in Guam. In June 2026, Black Construction received a $651.8 million award to modernize and protect power infrastructure at Naval Base Guam. The announced schedule anticipated construction starting in April 2027 and substantial completion in June 2031. Smalley described the company as continuing to pursue opportunities across the Indo-Pacific region.

For someone whose earlier career included several countries, the geography has a familiar breadth. His public LinkedIn profile lists English and Spanish. It also records service on the International Esperanza Project’s board from May 2017 to March 2025. These details sit alongside the financial appointments without needing to explain them away or turn them into a leadership formula.

There is room for dinner, too. Asked for a favorite restaurant outing in 2026, he chose anywhere with sushi. For a favorite quotation he selected, “It is better to be humble than humbled.” It is a neat choice for an executive whose responsibilities run to multibillion-dollar contracts. A construction schedule supplies plenty of opportunities for the world to offer its own opinion.

The years ahead will give that opinion physical form. Stations will have to become usable stations; tunnel plans will have to become completed connections. Smalley brings an accountant’s professional history to the assignment, along with a long education inside construction companies. His career has brought him to the desk. The unfinished work stretches well beyond it.