Two Generations on the Cover
The Winter 2020 Diversity Professional Magazine cover feature — and the suit-and-uniform story behind it.
Three Chieras. One cover.
In October 2020, Jannie Chiera, Richard Chiera, and Athena Chiera sat down for an interview with Diversity Professional Magazine. Three months later, the Winter 2020 edition came out with the Chiera family on the cover. The article was titled “Athena Engineering: Conquering Adversity with Resilience.”
The timing wasn’t subtle. The interview happened seven months into the pandemic. The cover ran when most companies were still figuring out whether they’d survive 2020. Diversity Professional wanted to know how a 36-year-old family-led, woman- and minority-owned mechanical construction firm was navigating the moment. The article ended up being less about the moment and more about the long arc — the founding, the early downturns, the family dynamic, and the values that kept the firm going through everything that came at it.
“Whatever the problem is, we figure it out. That’s how they raised me. Nothing has ever been handed to any of us. We scrape. We hustle. We don’t stop.”
Athena Chiera, VP of Business Development
The suit and the uniform.
The story that’s stuck with us from that interview is Richard’s. Two years into running Athena Engineering, in 1986, the bottom fell out of the economy. The company was small. There was no marketing budget. There was barely a payroll. Richard kept two outfits in his truck — a suit and a work uniform.
“I’d go out and sell to clients in my suit. Then I’d leave and return two hours later in my uniform to do the work. Most clients were understanding, and the engineers and line people actually respected it.”
Richard Chiera, Executive Vice President
Most companies don’t survive their first economic downturn. The ones that do tend to do it the way Richard did — by working both sides of the job, keeping the lights on, and earning enough respect from clients to be the firm they call the next time.
Why Diversity Professional ran the story.
Diversity Professional Magazine’s editorial mission is “to advance economic inclusion for underrepresented groups by focusing on issues that impact employment, entrepreneurship, and business.” Cover features go to firms whose story does something the magazine’s audience can learn from.
Athena’s story fit that brief in several ways. A family-led business that’s also a certified minority business enterprise and a certified woman-owned business is rare in commercial construction. A firm that’s survived four-plus decades of economic cycles is rarer still. And a firm where the second generation works alongside the founders — Athena Chiera as VP of Business Development, alongside both Jannie and Richard — is the kind of arc the magazine specifically exists to surface. By the time the article ran in January 2021, Athena Engineering had also just come off the 2018 cluster of supplier-of-the-year awards (NMSDC, SCMSDC, WBEC-West), Kaiser Permanente’s Exceptional Partner Award, and was actively working through the pandemic on hospital projects, lab pressurization retrofits, and the kind of mission-critical infrastructure work that doesn’t pause when the economy does. The cover wasn’t a lifetime-achievement piece. It was a snapshot of a firm in motion.
What the cover meant.
Press coverage is a strange thing. The work doesn’t change because a magazine ran a feature about it. But the article does signal something to the readers who haven’t met us yet — that the story is worth knowing, that the family dynamic is real, that the values aren’t a marketing claim. For prospective clients, prospective employees, and especially for younger women and minority entrepreneurs trying to figure out whether a career path in commercial construction is open to them, that signal matters.
The article still circulates. The cover photo still gets used. The story it told — adversity met with resilience, three Chieras working together, suit and uniform in the same truck — is still the story.
Read the original article.
The full Winter 2020 Diversity Professional Magazine feature is available in their digital archive at diversityprofessional.com. A PDF version is available here.
