News
If you haven’t yet had the chance to meet Indira Kolonic, a Project Manager based in South Florida, it won’t be long before you start to feel the ripple effects of the waves she’s making within the company. At the time of this writing, Indira was the only female project manager at Foundry (we’ve since hired two more), and she has quickly made a name for herself as a hard-working professional who always goes the extra mile for clients.
During Foundry’s Producer Summit in February, Director of Project Management David Kafel presented Indira with the 2022 Project Management Impact Award, stating “We all have stress and pressure in our different service lines, and in PJM we’re under constant pressure to deliver projects on time and under budget. One project is hard enough to manage and then add 5 or 10 on top of that under all different phases of the process is a challenging task. When Indira joined us, she was assigned over 50 different projects, took the reins, and plowed her way through. Her fearless and hard-working attitude has elevated Foundry’s project management platform in the South Florida market. She had two back-to-back months in fees that were more than a third of her yearly billings. Indira, in only your first year with Foundry, you crushed it, and we couldn’t be prouder to count you as part of the team.”
Indira joined Foundry early in 2022 and has quickly become one of the best-known project managers in the platform. In her role, she works closely with project managers within Foundry’s services platform to drive production, deliver gold standard client services, and provide risk management analysis to reduce project risk to all stakeholders. She has managed projects for Foundry across multiple markets including Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. She is responsible for owner, tenant, and landlord improvement tenant improvement projects in various industries from commercial office, industrial to retail sectors.
Her experience includes a wide variety of project types ranging from multi-use development to luxury retail, commercial, and government ground-up construction. Originally from Chicago, Indira attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she earned an architecture degree. However, upon entering the workforce, she quickly learned that working in architecture kept her behind a computer and away from client-facing engagements, which did not suit her. She moved on to join Pacific Construction Services, a smaller GC in Chicago, where she started as an Executive Assistant, and learned the ropes of ground-up commercial and government projects. She later moved into a Project Management role at Shawmut Design and Construction, overseeing luxury retail tenant buildouts for marquee projects including Apple, Headspace Headquarters, and Tiffany & Co. A chance request from her sister to relocate with her to South Florida is what eventually led her to Foundry.
“At Foundry, I love the opportunity to be face-to-face with the owners of the projects I oversee, approaching each project as a partnership, working through processes and challenges together, staying in constant communication about where we are in the overall progress of a project,” Indira said.
Indira works closely with Foundry clients Zurich, UBS, ARA, Terreno, and Arkadia Property Group. Put simply, Foundry’s Project Management function provides clients with the know-how behind every step of the process, from design to permitting to building, from inspections to staying on budget. She is currently overseeing a full-floor, 18,000-square-foot buildout for a client in the Plaza 100 building Foundry manages in Ft. Lauderdale, among other projects.
She laughs as she notes that she now has one client contact saved in her phone’s contacts as ‘BFF,’ given all the time they spend communicating. “We have worked together for months, revising the design of the space to meet him at the price-point he wanted in his lease. And he is the type of client who really likes to know all the details of the project and get frequent status updates. We have had some challenges along the way, but just last night, when we passed the smoke test for the property, he reached out to tell me how much he appreciates the hard work we have been putting in. It’s those relationships that make it all worthwhile. My job is to make sure the tenants and owners are taken care of; and I think they really do see the hard work we put in.”
If you’d like to get in touch with Indira, email her at Indira.Kolonic@foundrycommercial.com.