CONSTRUCTION CAREER
Driven to Grow
The mark of a solid career is being able to continuously grow, change and
learn as you go, just like Dean Abbondanza of J.D. Fields & Company Inc.
Consider what it means to stay comfortable
in a career. Tony Robbins,
renowned philanthropist, coach and
entrepreneur, said, “Business is a spiritual
pursuit. Your business will not grow unless
you grow as a person.” Stepping outside the
comfort zone of your career, then, allows you
to grow both spiritually and professionally
and become a better, more valuable version
of yourself for your team, your business and,
most importantly, you.
Just ask Dean Abbondanza, director of
technical sales and business development at
J.D. Fields & Company Inc. He’s spent his
career doing just that.
Learning to grow
Having graduated from Point Park University
in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Penn.,
Abbondanza began working in surveying
and highway construction before moving
into sales engineering with an out-of-state
iron pipe manufacturer. A Pittsburgh man
at heart, Abbondanza jumped at the chance
to move his young family back into the
city when an opportunity with L.B. Foster
Company came about – an opportunity that
would effectively change his career.
“I got my start in the industry with L.B.
Foster. I became a piling sales engineer there;
I had a great experience and stayed about
four years,” he said. “Then Skyline Steel
approached me with a great opportunity to
grow professionally and technically, working
with an engineering group, and to grow into
business development and market development
for the company. It was a good experience
and I was there just shy of seven years.”
Abbondanza made sure to remain open
to learning about all of the different aspects
of the deep foundations industry and, specifically,
steel piling. As a result, his experience
grew, positioning him as a significant asset
to any company, large or small, which is
what brought him to his current professional
home of J.D. Fields & Company Inc.
“At the time, J.D. Fields was a small
regional distributor. The construction products
piling division was a very small segment
of the business. They had landed a
great opportunity with a mill in Germany
that was coming out with a new, stateof
the-art sheet pile line. Through their
interactions with this German company,
the owner of J.D. Fields had somehow
gotten hold of my resume. By then, I had
been working for about nine months doing
business development sales engineering for
a pipe manufacturer for the oil and gas
industry, so was out of the piling industry
altogether. When I got the call from J.D.
Fields, I was pleasantly surprised and really
excited to get back into piling.”
By Jess Campbell
Photos courtesy of Dean Abbondanza
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