Gary Wood is a 31-year construction veteran who started in the family business at the ripe age of 14, renovating, renting and flipping residential and commercial real estate — a legacy he still carries on today with his portfolio of properties.
The early lessons learned through the family business laid the foundation for him to start his first company in 2011, Stryker Construction, a commercial general contractor focused on renovating buildings and their interior spaces for the office, retail, industrial, institutional, medical, pharmaceutical, and corporate markets. After 12 years building Stryker, he acquired Artisan, a heavy industrial construction company based in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, serving Midwest clients in manufacturing, power generation, food and beverage, aerospace & defense, chemical, oil & gas, agricultural, water and wastewater, and a strong footprint in the mining sector.
Artisan is built around self-perform construction, with crews specializing in millwright and mechanical work, equipment installation, rotational equipment, structural concrete, interior construction, rigging, facility maintenance, and plant shutdowns — deep technical capability that most contractors subcontract out rather than run in-house.
Gary's St. Louis office continues to serve the broader CRE market across commercial, institutional, healthcare, and corporate projects — while offering clients an even more specialized ability to build complex, technical industrial projects through Artisan's team of industrial specialists.
That dual vantage point — leading a full-service GC while self-performing highly technical industrial work — gives Gary real-time visibility into construction costs, labor availability, and project activity across nearly every asset class, and the perspective to speak on where the construction market is heading.