George T. Heery

On January 1, 1998, Satulah Group sold its corporate real estate project management outsourcing business units to LaSalle Partners of Chicago, now Jones Lang LaSalle, and changed its name to Brookwood Group, retaining the Development Management and Architectural and Planning services group.

In a 1993 article in "The Military Engineer" Heery asserted that the primary benefit of this new form of project delivery would be that, by rearranging the roles of architects, engineers and general contractors, it would be possible to provide an owner with a known, lump-sum fixed full construction price at a point in the design and construction sequence approximately midway through the design phases and with the owner having only about half of the design cost at risk while reducing the owner's exposure to contractor-initiated change orders and claims.

In 1989, George Heery co-founded Satulah Group with his two older children, Shepherd and Laura Heery. The firm included four business units: corporate real estate project management outsourcing; Brookwood Design Group, a design practice committed to the Bridging method and planning; an information technologies unit based around a small software development group in support of corporate real estate functions; and one real estate development activity largely devoted to project management for converting banking facilities after bank mergers and acquisitions.

In 1986, George Heery and the other shareholders at Heery International sold the company to British Insulated Callender's Cables (BICC), a publicly traded British Company, later known as Balfour Beatty. Heery was required by the sale to continue as CEO until March 1989.

By the 1980s the firm had grown and changed names to Heery International and Heery was Chairman, CEO and the largest shareholder of the largest program management, architectural and engineering firm in the Southeast with over 500 employees. Over a 17-year span, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, Heery oversaw an expansion of the firm's vision and capabilities.

In the early 1980s Heery began developing a new method of project delivery, believing there was a way to retain what he considered the strengths of the traditional Design-Build and Design-Bid-Build methods while eliminating the major disadvantages of those methods, three of which were identified as: an increasing dependence on specialty subcontractors for knowledge on costing (meaning that architects and engineers no longer had the "best" knowledge on costing), the fallacy that construction contract documents will always be free of errors, and an increase in litigation based on disputes.

In 1968 Heery & Heery was ranked as the first or second largest architectural firm in Atlanta, Georgia, and among the top five largest in the southern United States.

By the late 1960s Heery & Heery had established a reputation of delivering projects under intensely short schedules. In Marietta, Georgia, the company designed and built a 54,000-square-foot (5,000 m) production plant for the C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in only 160 days, a full three weeks ahead of schedule. More often than not these "double-quick" projects were industrial facilities, prompting criticisms that much of the firm's work lacked architectural character. Manufacturing clients like Lockheed were more concerned about meeting schedules.

In 1952, George Heery entered private practice by joining with his architect father, C. Wilmer Heery, Jr., who had an established firm in Athens, Georgia. Together, George and his father formed Heery and Heery, with Wilmer Heery continuing to practice in Athens, Georgia, and George leading the Atlanta office. George Heery, along with other notable architects such as Joe Amisano, John Portman, Tom Ventulett, and Jerome Cooper, was considered to be among the first generation of modern architects in post-war Georgia.

During the late 1950s, Heery developed a set of combined architectural, engineering, and project management procedures for greatly accelerating design and construction for industrial projects. During the mid-1960s, Heery and a small group of other professionals, including Louis N. Vic Maloof, FAIA, RIBA, FCMAA and Chuck Thomsen, FAIA, FCMAA, developed the concept of Construction Program Management for the purpose of controlling time and cost on behalf of the owner in construction programs.

Born in Athens, Georgia, Heery served in the Pacific arena in the U.S. Navy in the later years of World War II, entering college upon an honorable discharge in 1946. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1951, with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Architecture. Later he completed the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

George T. Heery, FAIA RIBA FCMAA (June 18, 1927—January 21, 2021) was an American architect and known for developing the concepts of Construction Program Management, Strategic Facilities Planning and the Bridging Method of project delivery.