In Construction Industry, Lusk Builds Connections

Chief development officer Christina Lusk is the driving force in generating business for East Harding Construction. However, at no time in her career has the transaction been her focus.

To Lusk, it’s about building relationships.

“Here’s my philosophy on business: It’s all about people,” she said. “I’m in the construction business, but really I’m in the people business. Very often, what I do for East Harding does not involve a sales call.”

The approach has worked out well in her career, Lusk said, but it does not yield an instantaneous result.

In construction, building materials that take the longest to procure or create are considered long lead items, and relationships are long lead items, she said. “There’s no rushing them, especially if they’re genuine.

“You show genuine interest in people, because they’re people and because they are interesting. And you do things that are kind, and you do things to help others, with zero expectation of return,” Lusk said. “Sometimes, it does return. It returns in the form of business, or it comes back in the form of friendship — but that’s not the point.”

The attitude melds well with East Harding’s long-held marketing tagline: “client-focused construction,” she said.

Lusk has been with the Little Rock-based company about two years. She works from the Northwest Arkansas office at 500 E. Henri de Tonti Blvd. in Springdale.

When she was featured in the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class of 2006, Lusk was a business development officer at Nabholz Construction Corp. in Rogers.

She got that job while working for the Bentonville/Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce, and before that Lusk was an entrepreneur.

She owned a corporate gift basket company in Colorado. Lusk lived there several years — although she is an Arkansas native — after earning her bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies at the University of Colorado at Denver. She got married during that time, and had four children. 

When she moved back to Northwest Arkansas in the early 2000s, Lusk then a divorced, single mother, pitched the gift basket concept to Harps Food Stores Inc.

She pointed to the potential profit margin, in addition to the grocer’s opportunity to tap into something no other local business was doing.

As a result, Harps started a gift basket division, which Lusk led for a while, building to a staff of 17. 

It wasn’t her first foray into business entrepreneurship. When her parents lived in Russia in the 1990s, Lusk started a business importing nesting dolls, which ended up being sold in seven states, in a variety of stores, including Neiman Marcus.

Her parents were in Russia to volunteer their medical services at an orphanage. Her father was a physician and her mother a nurse.

Lusk was raised on altruism. Her father made house calls and often cleared his patients’ medical fees at the end of the year.

About a dozen times during Lusk’s childhood, he came home driving a much older and more run-down vehicle than the one he went to work in, because he had traded titles with a patient who was in poverty.

Lusk saw a similar spirit of generosity in Larry Lusk, whom she married a few years after returning to NWA, which she considers home.

She, in turn, gives back to the community in a multitude of leadership roles for various organizations, committees and councils.

She also gives back through mentorship, paying forward the counsel and support she was given throughout her career and in her personal life when she was younger.

Lusk has seen her share of struggles, including a family health issue that prompted her to pull back into a consulting role in 2008. During that time, the family was living temporarily in central Arkansas.

In 2013, Lusk started full-time work again at Clark Contractors, but upon moving back to NWA a year later, took a job at East Harding, as the company opened its first, full-time office in NWA.

 “One of the things I’ve appreciated about East Harding and my boss, [CEO] Van Tilbury, is that they trust me enough to allow me to do it the way I think it needs to be done,” Lusk said. “I know what my job is, I know what the expectations are and they have left it to me how I do that, within reason.

“I understand I’m in a very unique role. I love what I do. It doesn’t mean there aren’t hard days or disappointments,” Lusk said, “but I just love it, with every ounce of my being.”