Sharon Douglas is not afraid to jump off a building, pull over on the side of the road to ask someone she doesn’t know for a job cleaning their construction site, or fiercely defend her family.
Douglas stood up to men and worked to fight the glass ceiling in her military, corporate and construction careers. Those fights led her away from and back to Fort Worth, where she now is CEO of Potere Construction.
A Dunbar High School alumna, Douglas was born and raised in Fort Worth. She was eager to learn and get to her next level of education, so she took summer classes and graduated early. At 16, she went to Huston–Tillotson University, a historically Black college in Austin. Her GPA was high enough to get accepted without taking the SAT test.
Other people in her family previously attended the university, and she was eager to start college. While there, she met with a man visiting campus who retired from the Air Force. After speaking with her family, Douglas decided to join the Army.
“The military was a way to advance my management skills and being in an operation where you manage people,” she said. “When I signed up, I started getting really excited. Just for being in the military, even though I was still in school, we went to, I call it, adventures. We went to Fort Hood, different places. And I was one of those cadets that whatever you taught me, I was going to get it.”
That included learning how to freefall jump from the University of Texas at Austin tower. And then the football stadium.
“The newspaper came out, and he said — I may have been about 104 pounds back then — ‘How do you do that? You’re so small,’ ” Douglas said. “I said, it’s not about being small. I’ve been trained by the best, so I’m good.”
After her training, she was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. Taking pride in her role and position, she kept her uniform perfect and was tasked with training new cadets on the dress code in her unit.
It taught her about giving, giving of herself and her time to help others be successful, Douglas said.
“I believed in the troops being the best that could be, and they called me ‘Superwoman’ because I would barely be perspiring if I ran three miles,” Douglas said. “The only reason why that happened was because I was so focused on the troops getting through, making sure they were OK. My focus was on them and not on myself.”
She used her time in the military to keep learning and bettering herself. Even as a lieutenant, she did not just leave the work to those in her unit. One day, while in charge of the motorized equipment, Douglas did not want to leave repairs to those below her in rank.
Instead, she got in the motor pool, which is where the Army keeps its vehicles, and asked the soldiers there to show her how it all works.
Getting in the dirt and doing the work is essential to her leadership style.
The approach led her to first form a cleaning crew and later a construction company. Douglas decided to go into the reserves because she saw many officers were being terminated instead of promoted. She entered the civilian workforce in 1982 first at Miller Brewing Co. in Fort Worth, then to General Mills in Ohio and Iowa in 1985, then to the Dial Corp. in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1993.
But first, she retired from the military officially in 1992, because she was a single mother and was too close to getting deployed during Desert Storm. She said she will never regret that decision for her son.
After she relocated, she was frustrated with the work of a construction crew at the apartment complex where she and her son lived in 1989. She said it was not being cleaned well and she could barely open the sliding door.
Douglas walked straight to the trailer on site and asked who was doing the cleaning. Then she asked to be the cleaning crew instead.
Within 24 hours, she had a team assembled and ready to go in at night and clean up after the construction crew. Douglas started working with Trammell Crow for 18 years, cleaning up construction sites with her company, Bradley D’s Cleaning Service, which officially formed in 1995.
In 2012, she dissolved the cleaning side of her company, choosing to focus on highway construction or concrete. Originally, Potere was called Bradley Douglas Construction Service, named after her son.
But one day, some of the trucks were driving with an expired toll tag. Her son, Bradley, kept getting sent the bills. When the license plate showed it was for the company, Douglas went to pay the bill.
She was told that Bradley Douglas had to pay for it. She tried to explain she was the owner of the company and there to pay the bill. She had to speak with a manager because they were not allowing her to pay the bill.
Douglas had to prove she was the owner of the company and truck before they would accept her payment. She had to show her articles of incorporation before finally being allowed to pay the bill.
As soon as she got back to her car, she called Bradley and said enough is enough and decided the company needed a name change.
But she wasn’t sure what to call it. One day, she woke up and the word “power” was in her head. She prayed over it and remembers saying, “Lord, I don’t want this company to be called power,” she said. She started Googling other words for power, which is how she found “Potere,” the Italian word for power, in 2017.
Over the years, Douglas managed the growth and changes of the company while still keeping true to its values, said her brother, Marion Douglas. Marion is the executive assistant at Potere and has worked on and off for his older sister since the company’s inception.
His sister is strategic in how she handles business, and she’s also his protector. As his older sister by four years, Sharon protected Marion since he was a baby, he said. Her protection extends to her company, too.
“This company, under her leadership, will become more of a beacon for not only people of color, women of color,” Marion said. “ I see this company being a beacon for those coming behind or letting them know that this is what can happen if you put your heart and soul into relationships.”
Some of Douglas’ favorite concrete projects with Potere are the Integrated Operation Center for American Airlines, the Frost tower downtown, the AC Marriott hotel downtown, part of I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA, she said.
Douglas also serves as the chairwoman of the board of Southeast Fort Worth Inc. Her community work is important, she said, because it’s where she grew up.
President of Southeast Fort Worth Inc. Stacy Marshall said Douglas brings a lot of knowledge about the construction industry. She brings a perspective about not only if a project will fit in a space, but what it means for the community, he said.
“She’s hands off, but stays very involved at the same time,” Marshall said. “She makes certain that she knows about all facets of the organization. She understands the mission and the vision. She understands the process of how we worked with the county and the city. She understands how developers want to do certain things.”
Douglas is the first Black woman to chair the board, Marshall said. That is historic, but also ties into her community service. Douglas goes into schools and talks to students and shows young Black and brown girls the benefits of construction and gives them a role model.
She specifically spends time at Morningside Middle School. She wants to be involved in the lives of the students and help them and do what she can to help the district succeed, Douglas said.
Part of that is helping promote school bonds. Voters approved one bond proposal but rejected three other parts of the bond package in November. She does not understand why voters would not not want to improve the schools for children.
“If they go into a school that is brighter, more colorful, more intuitive when it comes down to them being involved in it, all the different adventures they can go through in that school change and learn. Why not?” she said. “Put them in another environment where they know that there’s something greater than where you came from.”
Potere also used to build houses, but when the housing market crashed, Douglas shifted focus. And, just like in the military, she got in the mud to learn about laying concrete with her employees when the time came.
That experience helped her truly respect what her employees do.
Douglas visits a job site, hops on a piece of equipment and tells her employee, “Let me have a little fun.”
Douglas will always make sure to show her employees she supports them, and they are in it together.
“How else can you read them if you really don’t know what they’re doing?” Douglas said. “You have to be understanding; how can you be understanding if you really don’t know the force that they’re up against?”
Kristen Barton is an enterprise reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at kristen.barton@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article was originally published by Fort Worth Report.