BROTHER ACT.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Clancy and Theys Construction Co. - Brief Article

Its owners keep their feet on the ground, but Clancy & Theys keeps moving dirt.

Want a pistachio?" Tim Clancy, president and CEO of Clancy & Theys Construction Co., sticks out a hand with a nut pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He's munching them in the lobby of his Raleigh company and chatting with the receptionist, a woman with a neat gray coif and pink rouge. The lobby is small, unadorned. Business and construction magazines litter the glass-top coffee table, which is surrounded on three sides by cloth-covered couches.

"C'mon, I'll show you around," he says, stepping into a hallway lined with color photographs of buildings his company has done. He's wearing a black, cable-knit sweater over a check shirt, black trousers and black tassel loafers. It's a Clancy moment -- low-key, unpretentious. A visitor is coming, so he meets him in the lobby. Clancy, who owns and runs the company with his brother Tick, doesn't go for any of the usual magisterial displays of CEO sell-importance. Visitors aren't made to wait, like supplicants calling on a king.

Half a dozen steps down the hail, he takes a left into his office. It's small -- no bigger than what bank branch managers get -- and has one window looking out on a parking lot full of pickups and dump trucks, all of them in the company's trademark Carolina blue with the red-and-white C&T logo on the doors. Piles of paper cover the desk and the floor around it. Atop one pile sits a journal called Archaeological Reports. The bookshelves beside the desk are crowded with models of World War II warplanes. A model of the Rosetta stone hangs on the wall. Nearby is a photo of Clancy and a friend with Mikhail Gorbachev. Not far from that is a lithograph of a booted foot stomping on a hand reaching for a pistol by modern-art master Roy Lichtenstein. "I'm a dilettante," he jokes. "I'm not good at focusing on any one thing."

It's hardly what you'd expect from the CEO of the state's seventh-largest construction company, according to Business North Carolina's list of the state's top general contractors. Last year, it earned $193.4 million from North Carolina projects and $284.5 million total. There's no anteroom with a slim, honey-voiced secretary looking up phone numbers when the boss barks. No room for the usual assembly of couch, chairs and coffee table where the big man can hold forth. No indication that this is the office of the head of a company that has been trusted with such high-profile projects as the restoration of the governor's mansion and the expansions of UNC's Kenan Stadium and Raleigh's Memorial Auditorium.

In the era of Internet millionaires, Tim and Tick Clancy run a business in an old-fashioned industry and do it in an old-fashioned way. Their management principles, if you can even call them that, are so simple they sound square. Tell the truth. Give customers what they want. Don't make excuses. Let the work speak for itself. As a friend says, "They take pride in being humble."

If possible, Tick, 49, is even more low-key than his...