Aaron Zych
Vice President
1. Tell me about ILT Vignocchi, and how did you get in the business?
We serve the entire Chicagoland area, mainly focusing on the North Shore. The company was started in 1969 by my father-in-law, Harry. He and his father and uncles, they were Italian immigrants, and when they came here they were stone masons. Harry had an entrepreneurial spirit, and combined with his love of the outdoors, he started the company. We’re a design/build and maintenance company, both commercial and residential. I started here as an intern in 1999. I rolled it into a full-time position in 2000 when I graduated and I’ve been here ever since — I even met my wife (Donna, president) here.
2. What is your favorite tool to get the job done?
My favorite tool is a program called Lumion. You take your SketchUp model into it and make it look any way you want, so you can make it look like real life. Make it rain, make it snow, make it do videos from it. When I started using Lumion about three or four years ago, that has been a game-changer in terms of how our team puts out drawings to our clients.
3. Do you have a family and what do you do for fun?
My wife and I have a 16-year-old daughter. She’s just a great kid. I played the French horn growing up and now she’s playing the French horn … we’re both music nerds. And for fun, we’re all foodies — we like going out to eat with friends. And we have friends who live all around the country, so we do travel
a lot to see our friends.
4. What is something — a book, movie, anything — that you’d recommend to me and LM’s readers?
As I said earlier, I’m a huge foodie. I think there’s a lot of correlation between extremely high-end restaurants and our industry — the front-of-house / back-of-house, sales people versus production. When everything is moving smoothly, your experience at that restaurant is second to none. But when there’s tension between the two, you can feel it. There’s a book (by Paul Clarke) called “Lessons in Excellence from Charlie Trotter.” Trotter was a chef in Chicago; at one point he had the top restaurant in the world. The small stuff he did to make sure his restaurant was the best in the world, it gets your mind thinking — what can we do in our industry, the little things that make a big difference, that really make our customers’ experience the best you could possibly imagine?
5. Do you have a most memorable day at work?
I should say the day I met my wife, if I want to be politically correct (laughs). It’s not just one day, it’s any day you leave the customer’s house, when you finish a job or you bump into them three years after you’ve finished the job, and they tell you how much they love it and that it still looks great. When I walk away from a meeting like that, I’m on cloud nine.
