Jennifer Wilson – THE STAR
October 15, 2010
To call Cindy Stumpo tough would, perhaps, be a bit of an understatement. The home builder and host of the new HGTV series Tough as Nails (Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m.) admits it isn’t easy being a woman in a male-dominated industry: “It’s a job that requires thick skin.
“Everyday, you’re chasing grown men to do their job. It takes a very strong female to do that.”
The reality series follows Stumpo’s packed life as she runs C. Stumpo Development, a multi-million dollar construction and development company based in Massachusetts, while keeping her contractors, employees and ex-husband in line, as well as holding down the homefront as a single mother of two.
Stumpo says that while Tough as Nails certainly has its dramas, “It’s a real company. We’re out there, really working for a living. We actually really do something.”
She notes with pride that the show helps drive home the fact that she “wasn’t a front for a husband or a father. No one in my family was ever in the construction business.”
Stumpo was drawn to the industry after her own renovation went badly. With a home full of disgruntled subcontractors who hadn’t been paid, and an interest in building houses already, at just 23 years old she took over responsibility for her own project and launched her career.
“I’ve been on the other side, where a builder tries to take advantage of the homeowner. I’ve had that happen to me,” she explains, so “I said to myself, ‘Wow, I will never ever be a builder like this.’ ”
But for Stumpo, there’s more to both the business and Tough as Nails than her passion for building luxury homes: it’s also about being a strong female role model.
When the show premiered, Stumpo says, she heard from women all across the country. It “broke my server down twice,” she says. They were “in awe that a woman could do this.”
There was not always so much support for her chosen career. When she told her father she wanted to build houses, “He said, ‘Girls don’t do that.’ I said, ‘This girl is going to do that.’ I knew I had the personality to handle it,” she says. And, despite a disaster renovation, a pregnancy and an illness, she finished her courses in the hospital and never looked back.
“There weren’t too many girls in construction (back then) … but now we’ve pushed the barrier.”
It was a tough start. “You try to do things like a young woman, you try to be classy, articulate . . . start with the pleases and the thank yous,” she says. Before long, you become “jaded across the board . . . it goes to ‘You know what? You just get this job done.’ ”
And, while women across the U.S. may be inspired by her, her decisions are also having an impact closer to home: her daughter, Samantha, intends to join the family business.
Stumpo says she was wary when Samantha, who was working for her during the summers, said she wanted to become a builder. She says it’s hard to watch her daughter go through many of the same things she did when she was starting out, including men who underestimate her abilities and the struggle to gain respect.
Plus, she says, she has to be just as tough on her daughter as anyone else who works for her — joking that she calls her daughter “my blondie” for a reason — and, she says proudly, that if all goes well they will be the only second-generation female construction business in the U.S.
The pair will continue to build houses together. “As long as it does not hurt her and my relationship as mother and daughter,” explains Stumpo. “That comes first. Work comes second.”
