Rockfinnan Construction began after hours, with one laptop in the basement of a New York apartment building. By day, founder, CEO and President Patrick Ryan worked his full-time construction job. At night, he priced work for a company that did not yet have much of a track record, trying to build a client base one opportunity at a time. His wife was pregnant with their first child, the couple had just bought a house, and the timing could hardly have been less comfortable. “More money had to come in the door, so I thought of opening up a side business where I could obtain a client base outside of my daily job with H&F, so I could open up my own thing and see where it went,” Ryan said.
That was 2015. A little more than a decade later, Rockfinnan is working across some of New York’s most recognizable developments, specializing in commercial flooring applications including self-leveling systems, polished concrete, overlays and epoxy. The scale has changed dramatically, but Ryan still talks about the company in terms that sound much closer to those first nights in the basement than to the towers it now works in. “You always look at the bigger jobs as milestones, but the first milestone is realizing that coming from a small village in rural Ireland, if you have enough drive and passion for something, you can actually do it,” he said. “You’ll have naysayers along the way, and you’ll face roadblocks and obstacles, but when I started, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and we’d just bought and moved into a new house. It wasn’t the ideal time to start, but I thought if we got through the early stages, we could get through anything.”
The first major proof came in Manhattan. Rockfinnan secured work at 555 West 38th Street, a 52-story residential tower with approximately 600 apartments. The company was responsible for self-leveling from the second floor upward, giving a young contractor a chance to demonstrate that it could carry a large vertical project over dozens of floors.
High-rise work has remained a significant part of the business. “We still do a lot of self-levelling in the towers, so we always carry a tower or two every year where we’re doing multiple stories,” Ryan said. Rockfinnan is also certified with major epoxy manufacturers, allowing the company to pair leveling work with a broader range of finished-floor systems.
Larger assignments followed. At the Lumen Building in Long Island City, a nearly 900,000-square-foot, 67-story residential tower, Rockfinnan again handled self-leveling from the second floor upward along with an epoxy scope. Ryan describes the project simply as “a nice [job] to have on the CV,” but its significance is clearer when viewed against the company’s starting point only a few years earlier.
Hudson Yards has since become another important source of work. Rockfinnan recently completed flooring as part of a renovation at Edge, the observation deck high above Manhattan. “We did all the new commercial flooring in there, including polished concrete and all new epoxy floors on the new exhibits on the 100th floor,” Ryan said.
At nearby 20 Hudson Yards, the company performed other work, while a Wells Fargo project spanning 1.4 million square feet brought Rockfinnan into a substantial preconstruction scope involving warehouse pads, epoxy and self-leveling across the floors. The company is also working at 345 Park Avenue, where it continues to handle mechanical-floor work, including removal of existing epoxy and installation of new systems through a three-phase program.
The assignments are large, but some of Rockfinnan’s clearest demonstrations of capability come from jobs where the flooring itself presents an unusual problem. At 55 Hudson Yards, floor differentials complicated a polished-concrete installation to the point that the team had to rethink how the transition would be built and finished.
“It took a lot of thinking in the office, field visits, and surveys, but we got it right in the end.”
“It’s hard even to explain the obstacles we had there because there were so many variables with the concrete topping, so we had to go above and beyond to get that one right,” Ryan said. “It took a lot of thinking in the office, field visits, and surveys, but we got it right in the end.”
The satisfaction was not simply in completing another contract. “It was challenging, but also very successful, and it’s nice to look back at what we achieved there,” he said.
A project at Jacob Riis Park created an opportunity for a different kind of finish. Working within an older city building that had been privately acquired, Rockfinnan restored floors throughout the property, including the new lifeguard station, and installed colored concrete and epoxy in back-of-house and kitchen areas. Upstairs, the team created a polished-concrete overlay with a subtle visual reference to the building’s coastal setting. “We did a very nice overlay there, and we put a little hint in it to make it look like the sand with the reflection on the back,” Ryan said. “It’s something that you can walk down and be proud of, not only now, but in years to come—it’ll still look great.”
Rockfinnan’s current pipeline continues to bring unusual settings. At the Torch building, Ryan said the team is preparing to install epoxy around a planned drop roller coaster on the 41st floor of the mixed hotel and commercial development. The detail is unusual enough to stand out even in a portfolio filled with Manhattan towers, but it also reflects the range of conditions commercial flooring specialists encounter once a project moves beyond a straightforward slab.
Ryan does not suggest that every job goes exactly as planned. Quite the opposite: he sees mistakes and unexpected conditions as part of construction, with the real measure coming in how the contractor responds. “Look at every single construction job; something goes wrong on every one, but it’s about fixing it,” he said. “I’m looking for long-term relationships, not just in and out of a job to get as much as we can out of it.”
That emphasis on relationships helps explain why Ryan talks as readily about the people around him as he does the work itself. His background in Gaelic football and hurling gave him a vocabulary for business long before he became a company owner: perseverance matters, but so does understanding that nothing substantial is built alone.
“It’s the will to win, never giving in, and understanding you need teammates,” he said. “A lot of people think that they’re building this on their own, which they’re not—I have a great team around me, and I continue to look to them to drive this company on with me.”
The resilience behind that outlook predates Rockfinnan. Ryan recalls the difficulty of the 2008 downturn, when he and the man he had come to America with sometimes went weeks without being paid and could struggle to find enough money for the train into the city to collect their wages. “There are times when I think about 2008, when times were not great,” he said. “For me and the guy I came to America with, things were so bad we wouldn’t be paid for a few weeks, and we didn’t have enough money to get the train to the city. It was nearly a case of going hitchhiking to get into the city to get your wages, but I think that gets you to where you are today.”
The remainder of 2026 and the move into 2027 are expected to keep the company busy. Ryan said eight to 10 sizable projects were due to begin within a six-week period, with additional work already lined up. Internally, the focus is on sharpening both office and field operations so growth does not come at the expense of execution. “We’ve sharpened things up here in the office, and we’re continuing to do so in the field to get the best results we can for our client base, to keep them and drive more work,” he said.
A decade ago, Ryan was trying to create that client base after work with a laptop in a basement. Today, Rockfinnan is carrying multistory flooring packages across New York and preparing for another busy cycle of projects.
The setting may have changed considerably, but the mentality has not. “We’re in a good position now where we can hit the ground running on those and continue to grow year on year,” Ryan said. “You want to build on what you’ve done the previous year.”
