Meet Cory Elliott
Everything about Cory Elliott, CEO of CMT, LLC, resists a single label.
She’s Black. She’s a woman. She’s a roofing, demolition, and abatement contractor. But she’s also a St. Louis native with two master’s degrees from Washington University.
Elliott was a top operations/facilities executive with a major national healthcare organization. Working as an owner’s representative and now a contractor, she can view the M/WBE world from both sides of the table.
She gave up that lucrative job in healthcare operations/project management to start her firm. It took her two years to develop the concept for CMT.
“I would sit at night and do the business plan. When I started CMT the vision was to provide opportunities for people who wanted to grow and had not been given opportunities elsewhere.”
She committed to her original team that she would help them grow through apprenticeship, foreman, superintendent stages to potentially owning their own businesses.
Elliott said that as a black, woman business contractor she often found that the respect she had been given as a representative of a big healthcare industry firm was absent.
Her proudest moment as a contractor was her first $1M+ project, replacing the copper domes on the main Lambert Airport terminal. Other milestones were work on the Annie Malone Children and Family Service Center, and the Lucas Lofts
She is a strong believer in embracing adversity to become stronger rather than letting it overcome her. Elliott recalls counseling a female employee to channel the headwinds she was facing from coworkers on the jobsite. That woman ended up outperforming her male counterparts, Elliott said.
“She taught me something in that moment,” Elliott said. “Someone’s opinion of you should not change your opinion of you. She needed to straighten her crown — or in this case her hard hat. And I needed to be the woman in that moment who straightened another woman’s crown without letting the world know that it was crooked.”