Lasenta Lewis-Ellis: Building the Community That Built Her

There is something poetic about returning to the place where you once struggled and discovering that you now have the power to help rebuild it.

For Lasenta Lewis-Ellis, that poetry is written in concrete, contracts and construction plans.

Years ago, Lewis-Ellis was a young mother trying to build a life while navigating economic hardship, public assistance and income-based housing in Columbia. Today, she is the President and CEO of LLE Construction Group, a million-dollar construction company that has built, renovated and maintained spaces throughout the same community that helped shape her.

At D.H. Swinton Pointe, that journey came almost full circle.

The affordable housing development sits only a few blocks from an area where Lewis-Ellis once struggled as a young mother. But when she returned years later, she came back under very different circumstances.

This time, she was not wondering how she would make it.

She was helping build something for somebody else.

That distinction may tell the story of Lasenta Lewis-Ellis better than any revenue figure ever could.

Because while her success can be measured in contracts and dollars, her legacy may ultimately be measured in something else:

What she builds. Who she helps. And what she leaves behind.

Before She Built Buildings, She Had to Build a Future

Lewis-Ellis grew up in Columbia without seeing many people who looked like her working in architecture, engineering or construction.

She remembers wanting to become an architect or engineer but not having examples of Black professionals in those fields around her.

That mattered.

We often tell young people they can become anything. But imagination becomes much harder when you have never seen anyone who looks like you doing the thing you are being told is possible.

Lewis-Ellis somehow imagined it anyway.

Her motivation would later become deeply personal.

Her mother’s home went into foreclosure, and Lewis-Ellis began thinking about how she could one day build her mother another one. As a young single parent herself, she enrolled at Midlands Technical College and studied Architectural Engineering Technology.

College, however, did not remove the realities of motherhood.

At one point, childcare became a barrier serious enough to threaten her ability to continue attending classes. Lewis-Ellis has told the story of Mary Margaret Kindred at Midlands Technical College helping locate a grant that paid for childcare so she could remain in school.

It may sound like a small intervention.

It wasn’t.

Sometimes the difference between talent being developed and talent being lost is not ambition. It is access.

Someone found a way to remove one barrier from Lewis-Ellis’s path.

She has never forgotten it.

Her mother died before Lewis-Ellis could fulfill the original dream of building her a new home. But the dream of building never died with her.

Instead, it expanded.

Learning That Good Design Still Has to Be Built

After graduating from Midlands Technical College, Lewis-Ellis began working at the University of South Carolina as an Architectural Engineering Technician.

She could design.

She could draft.

She understood how something should look.

Then construction taught her another lesson.

Lewis-Ellis remembers being the only woman and only Black person in her department. When some of her designs reached the construction side, workers challenged whether what looked good on paper could actually be built.

It was not always delivered gently.

But Lewis-Ellis did something that would become a pattern throughout her career.

She learned.

Instead of retreating to the safety of what she already knew, she began going into the field. She watched construction crews work. She asked questions. She studied how drawings became walls, rooms and completed buildings.

She learned the difference between designing an idea and delivering a finished project.

Years later, she would describe herself as a “connector”—someone who enjoys bringing architects, engineers, contractors, owners and other professionals together to move a project from concept to completion.

That evolution is important.

Lewis-Ellis did not simply discover what she was good at.

She repeatedly discovered what she wasn’t good at yet—and went to learn it.

That may be one of the quietest secrets behind her success.

February 1, 2011

Then came another disruption.

Lewis-Ellis lost her job.

She had education. She had experience. She had professional skills.

And she still found herself struggling to find another position capable of supporting her family.

Unemployment benefits were not enough.

Eventually, frustration became a decision.

On February 1, 2011, she launched LLE Construction Group.

There was no enormous investment fund waiting.

No wealthy family financing the dream.

No overnight success.

Lewis-Ellis describes the beginning much more plainly:

“I started off broke.”

She has said she could not even afford the materials for her first project.

But she possessed another form of capital.

She had experience.

She had relationships.

She had a reputation.

And she understood the industry.

Her first contract came from a local school district that knew her work through her previous employment. What looked like a new company was actually backed by years of professional credibility.

Lewis-Ellis had been building LLE before LLE officially existed.

The Jobs Nobody Else Wanted

Her early strategy was simple.

Start small.

Lewis-Ellis had spent enough time around large construction companies to recognize something about their business model: many of them were interested in major construction projects, not small renovations.

A multimillion-dollar project made sense for their overhead.

Renovating one office often did not.

Lewis-Ellis saw opportunity in what they overlooked.

Instead of immediately trying to beat large contractors at their own game, she created a niche around the smaller projects they often didn’t want.

One renovation.

One office.

One project.

One relationship.

She describes the strategy in a phrase that could just as easily describe her life:

“One small project at a time.”

Starting small gave her room to build more than revenue.

She built systems.

She built relationships with subcontractors.

She learned pricing.

She learned scheduling.

She learned where businesses lose money.

She learned how to manage multiple trades and personalities.

She learned how to get projects completed on time and within budget.

And she learned how to grow.

Within roughly three years, Lewis-Ellis says LLE Construction Group crossed the $1 million mark in annual revenue.

The woman who started without enough money to purchase materials for her first project had entered what she would later call the “million-dollar table.”

But she was not satisfied sitting there alone.

Building the Places That Built Her

Some construction projects become more than projects.

For Lewis-Ellis, that is particularly true when her work brings her back into institutions that were part of her own life.

She is a product of Richland School District One.

Later, her career placed her in a position to participate in improvements within that same school system.

At Columbia High School, Lewis-Ellis worked on projects that included school improvements and, later, stadium upgrades.

New spaces.

New facilities.

A better environment for students and families who would come behind her.

Talking about that work, Lewis-Ellis once offered a sentence that captures how she sees construction:

“I left a legacy for others to enjoy.”

That is a very different way to describe a construction contract.

A contractor can look at a school and see square footage, labor costs, materials and margins.

Lewis-Ellis also sees memory.

She sees community.

She sees the students who will sit in the cafeteria, athletes who will compete on the field, parents who will fill the stands and young people who may never know the names of the people who helped build the spaces around them.

The building remains after the contractor leaves.

That is legacy.

From Receiving Help to Creating Access

Lewis-Ellis has never hidden the help she received along the way.

That matters because America loves the mythology of the completely self-made entrepreneur.

Her story is more useful than that mythology.

She worked.

She sacrificed.

She learned.

She took risks.

But people also opened doors.

Midlands Technical College gave her an accessible educational pathway.

Someone helped solve a childcare problem when motherhood threatened that education.

A school district gave a new company an opportunity.

Relationships developed over years became business opportunities.

Lewis-Ellis appears to have taken a lesson from all of it:

When somebody helps you through a door, don’t close it behind you.

She later established scholarships at Midlands Technical College, including support for a single parent and for a student studying Architectural Engineering Technology, with preference for a minority student.

She mentors entrepreneurs.

She works with women-owned and minority-owned companies.

She has used subcontracting to create opportunities for smaller businesses.

And after navigating the challenges of building LLE Construction Group, she began developing training designed to help other entrepreneurs understand business development and government contracting.

Her focus is not simply on helping someone start a business.

She wants businesses to grow.

To build capacity.

To win contracts.

To perform those contracts successfully.

To create wealth.

Lewis-Ellis has expressed that ambition very clearly:

“I want to see more of us sitting at that million-dollar table.”

There is power in the wording.

She does not say she wants more people invited into a room simply for the sake of representation.

She is talking about the table where contracts are awarded.

Where businesses scale.

Where capital moves.

Where economic decisions are made.

Where ownership matters.

A Different Kind of Historic Building

Today, another building helps tell the Lasenta Lewis-Ellis story.

Her office now sits inside a building she purchased and renovated in the same historically Black Columbia community that has been central to her life.

But this is not just another commercial property.

For years, the building served as an office of the South Carolina NAACP.

That history gives the property a meaning beyond real estate.

For generations, the NAACP fought to expand access to citizenship, education, voting rights, equal treatment and opportunity for Black South Carolinians.

Now a Black woman entrepreneur owns the building.

Her construction company operates there.

Business is developed there.

Contracts are discussed there.

Entrepreneurs can be taught there.

Economic opportunity can be created there.

The mission has changed.

But perhaps the larger pursuit has not.

The building once housed an organization fighting to open doors that segregation and discrimination kept closed.

Today, Lewis-Ellis occupies that space while working on another dimension of empowerment:

ownership.

There is something fitting about that.

Preserving history does not always mean turning a building into a museum.

Sometimes preservation means allowing the work of one generation to become the foundation upon which another generation builds.

The civil-rights movement fought to secure access.

Economic empowerment asks what we will do with that access once we have it.

Lewis-Ellis’s presence in that building creates a bridge between the two.

Not replacing one struggle with another.

Building upon it.

Still Building

It would be easy to end the Lasenta Lewis-Ellis story at one million dollars.

It makes a clean headline.

Single mother becomes millionaire entrepreneur.

Hardship becomes success.

Roll credits.

But that ending would miss the larger point.

Lewis-Ellis is still building.

She builds structures.

She builds businesses.

She builds relationships.

She builds pathways for women and minority entrepreneurs.

She builds on institutions that gave her opportunities.

And increasingly, she appears interested in building something that cannot be measured merely by the annual revenue of LLE Construction Group.

Capacity.

The capacity for another woman to grow a company.

The capacity for another small contractor to compete.

The capacity for another single mother to imagine a future beyond her current circumstances.

The capacity for a historically Black community to possess not simply history, but property, businesses and economic institutions of its own.

Lasenta Lewis-Ellis learned how to build buildings.

Then she learned how to build a business.

Now the more interesting question may be what she builds next.

Because if her story thus far is any indication, she will not be building it only for herself.