Tei Electrical Solutions is based in Maryland with locations in Fredrick and Baltimore City. In addition to managing day-to-day operations, Adissa Barry provides oversight for all healthcare, research, defense and commercial design/build projects. Her job is to make sure everyone stays on budget and on schedule, which requires very specific skills. In 2019, Adissa Barry received the City of Frderick Governor’s Office Award for Outstanding Business and Community Leadership.
With a degree in accounting from the US, Adissa Barry started her career working as a controller, part-time, for a construction company, where she worked for about 12 years. While working for this construction company, Adissa Barry noticed that many accountants were not familiar with construction accounting, a subject that she herself had mastered during her studies. Seizing this opportunity, she finally turned to construction accounting and, in July 2001, launched her own business, specialising in construction management.
She later found a business partner with an electrical engineering background who suggested a change in the company’s structure. As a result, the company specialises in electrical solutions and providing quality work in all aspects of new building construction.
Various construction projects
Since then, Adissa Barry’s company has completed projects for the US federal government, the city of Washington, and the private sector. In Florida, for example, the company built a psychiatric centre for the Veterans Service, renovated an X-ray room and built an intensive care unit. The company was also awarded a contract by the General Service Administration (GSA), a department of the US federal government, to renovate an Internal Revenue Service building in Lanham, Maryland. In general, Tei Electrical Solutions works on various commercial construction projects.
In 2004, Adissa Barry opened a computer department in her company to deliver computers to the US government and also hires computer technicians from the company. The company also exports computers throughout Africa, in collaboration with a French company to meet the computer needs of French-speaking countries. Adissa Barry’s company also exports construction equipment such as construction trucks, road construction equipment and hydraulic drilling equipment. Already in 2004, Adissa Barry’s company had a turnover of three million seven hundred thousand dollars.
Learning the basics of electrical construction
In this business, and in a sector dominated by men, Adissa Barry showed resilience by learning things outside her field of expertise. So she took evening classes in electricity and learned the basics of electrical construction to get certified. “I am a woman-owned business. I’m also a minority-owned business. When you apply for these certifications, they want to make sure you have at least a good knowledge of the business. So how do you get it? You have to educate yourself. I was taking night classes, cutting all these wires and taking electrical classes,” Adissa Barry told Voice of America.
Property owner
In addition, Adissa Barry has invested heavily in the real estate sector, with multi-million dollar investments in the industry. “Whenever there is a property on the market, you have to react quickly. If you don’t, you miss the property. But I’m addicted. I keep buying one property after another. As soon as I find a nice house, I buy it,” she said.
For Adissa, an entrepreneur is someone who takes risks and is mentally prepared to deal with the consequences of that risk. So the first risk she took was to open her business. “When I was in Burkina Faso, one of my teachers once told me, the definition of a businessman or woman is someone who takes a risk. The risk can be positive or negative. And he or she is mentally prepared to deal with any outcome of that risk. And I’m glad I took that risk,” she said.
Mentoring the community
Adissa Barry gives her time and talents to Habitat for Humanity along with several local churches and youth programs in Baltimore City. Through Project JumpStart, she mentored Baltimore City residents through an 87-hour pre-apprenticeship training program – 5 of whom went on to become employees in her company. Adissa Barry was nominated by the Frederick County Office of Economic Development.
Adissa Barry is the mother of two children. Her daughter is an interior designer and her son is a computer specialist who works at one of the top five technology companies in Silicon Valley.
When she can, Adissa Barry travels to Burkina Faso to visit her family and meet with local building contractors to discuss areas where they can collaborate to bring US technology to Burkina, a country that has some problems in some areas of construction.
