Building Leadership: William Day’s Construction Journey
William Day currently serves as an owner’s project manager for the Bassett Healthcare Network in Cooperstown, New York. In this demanding role, he oversees specialized healthcare construction projects across five separate hospitals and a footprint covering roughly 5500 square miles in central New York. While he currently manages complex building initiatives like installing new imaging rooms, his journey to this position followed a highly unconventional path.
Day holds a degree in English literature from Hartwick College and originally planned to become a high school teacher who helped students prepare for their SAT exams. However, his career trajectory completely changed after he applied to and attended Marine Corps Officer School, where he gained foundational leadership skills before being medically discharged.
Laying a Foundation of Quality
Following his time with the Marine Corps, Day fell back on his strong family roots. Had he stayed a full-time carpenter, he would have been the ninth generation in his family to work in the trade. Growing up, his father consistently secured him summer jobs sweeping, hooking lumber, and performing basic labor tasks on job sites. Day eventually leveraged this framing and carpentry experience, alongside his intensive military leadership training, to land his first project management role at Redpoint Design Build.
At Redpoint, Day managed the construction of high-end residential homes, often building properties for the very doctors he works alongside today. This critical experience taught him to never compromise on quality because clients are spending their hard-earned money to create their absolute dream homes.
Scaling Up With Speed and Systems
From high-end residential builds to fast-track commercial projects, Day made it a point to extract at least one major positive takeaway from every job he held.
Working in specialized millwork for luxury boutiques in New York City taught him vital lessons about exclusivity and professional networking. Later, he transitioned to building Taco Bell franchise locations, which completely shifted his professional perspective to focus purely on speed. Delivering a turnkey restaurant from a hole in the ground in just 120 days required highly streamlined systems to ensure no single day was lost to inefficiency.
Day later expanded his expertise to massive-scale projects while working for Jersen Construction Group. He learned to coordinate immense logistics, such as managing the strict systems required to check the slump and air mix of 150 concrete trucks during a 1500-yard pour. Day stresses that effective systems are not just complex spreadsheets, but rather a foundational understanding of timelines, such as knowing exactly when to file for a building permit to keep momentum.
Managing Healthcare Construction
Today, Day brings all those accumulated lessons in quality, speed, and massive scale to the Bassett Healthcare Network. Instead of managing traditional construction professionals, he now collaborates directly with surgeons and department chiefs who act as the clients for hospital renovations.
He navigates strict state regulations and coordinates complex builds, occasionally turning around specialized nuclear camera imaging rooms in just six weeks to meet rigorous compliance standards. He notes that a hospital operates like a miniature city, relying on a diverse trades workforce of over 200 facilities workers, including carpenters, HVAC technicians, and electricians.
Teaching the Next Generation
Outside of his demanding work at the hospital network, Day gives back to the construction industry by lecturing part-time for the construction management program at SUNY Delhi. He commits one night a week to teaching a two-hour lecture for the oldest construction management program in the country. He views this work as a vital way to help young professionals gain industry exposure.
Throughout his diverse career, Day attributes much of his success to a core philosophy of saying yes to new opportunities and figuring out the technical details along the way. Whether he is teaching college students or facing an unexpected project challenge, he relies on a principle ingrained in him by the Marine Corps. Day believes in always bringing solutions to a problem and maintaining a strong bias for action.
