LM Leo Mendoza
Content Manager · Portfolio 2026 · EN / ES

Content, Owned End to End.

Leo Mendoza is a bilingual content manager. He owns the whole life of a piece of content: finding the idea, researching it, planning the calendar, writing and producing it alongside the team, hitting publish, and staying in the conversation with the community after it goes live.

Contenido bilingüe, hecho entre Morelia y Nueva York.

One process, three kinds of output. Pick a door.

W.01 · Toll International · LinkedIn Newsletter

Newsletter Articles

Five long-form pieces for Toll International's LinkedIn newsletter. Leo pitches the topics, researches them, writes the drafts, and manages the publishing schedule behind the series.

Resuscitating Bertha: When a $3B Project Flatlines

On December 6, 2013, sixty feet beneath the streets of downtown Seattle, the world's largest tunnel-boring machine dropped dead.

Her name was Bertha. She was five stories tall, 57 feet in diameter, weighed 6,700 tons, and cost $80 million to build. Her job was straightforward on paper: carve a 1.7-mile tunnel to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct, a crumbling double-decker highway that had been declared seismically unsafe after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The entire SR 99 project was budgeted at $3.1 billion. Bertha was its beating heart.

Four months into the dig, that heart stopped.

What Happened Underground

Operators noticed the warning signs first: hydraulic temperatures spiking, the cutterhead grinding more slowly. They assumed Bertha had hit a patch of the dense glacial till that sits beneath much of Seattle, deposited by the Vashon ice sheet some 15,000 years ago. Glacial boulders were expected. The machine was built to handle them. So they pushed harder.

Bertha groaned forward a few inches, then seized completely. Above ground, traffic continued rumbling across the very viaduct the tunnel was supposed to replace, a structure that was already sinking at a measurable rate. Below, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in American history had just flatlined. Every idle day cost an estimated $300,000 to $400,000 in overhead, equipment, and standing labor. The silence was deafening, and expensive.

The Misdiagnosis

But before the equipment broke down, something else had shattered: the information flow.

Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP), the contractor, was convinced Bertha had struck an unforeseen geological obstruction. They called it an excusable delay. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) wasn't buying it. Nobody had a clear picture of what was actually happening sixty feet underground, so engineers drilled exploratory boreholes from the surface, essentially biopsy needles probing blind into the earth.

In January 2014, they hit metal. The culprit wasn't a glacial boulder. It was an 8-inch steel well casing, a leftover from a groundwater monitoring program the state itself had conducted years earlier. A piece of forgotten infrastructure, buried in the path of the world's most advanced boring machine.

Open-Heart Surgery on a City Street

The diagnosis reframed the entire crisis. The contractor cried foul; a hidden foreign object had killed their machine. The owner countered that an 8-inch pipe shouldn't stop an $80 million beast designed to chew through glacial rock. But assigning blame couldn't restart the machine.

Bertha was too deep to repair in place and too massive to pull backward. The only option was one nobody wanted to say out loud: dig a rescue pit, 120 feet deep, 80 feet wide, directly in front of the stranded machine, in the middle of one of the densest urban corridors on the West Coast. Open-heart surgery, performed on a living city.

The risks were immediate and brutal. To excavate that deep, crews had to dewater the surrounding soil, pumping out massive volumes of groundwater to keep the pit from flooding. But groundwater is what holds up everything above it. As the water table dropped, the earth beneath Seattle's historic Pioneer Square began to compress and shift. Buildings that had stood since the 1890s, survivors of the Great Seattle Fire, started developing cracks in their foundations. Sidewalks buckled. Monitoring sensors installed on nearby structures ticked upward.

It was a brutal paradox: the only way to save the project was a procedure that threatened to sink the neighborhood around it. It took nearly two years of careful, agonizing excavation, just to dig the pit, lift Bertha's 2,000-ton front assembly to the surface, and crack her open.

The Real Cause of Death

When engineers finally performed the autopsy, they found something the steel pipe alone couldn't explain. Hitting the casing was the triggering event, but the fatal damage was self-inflicted.

When operators pushed the machine harder against the obstruction, the resulting heat and pressure blew the seals on the main bearing, a component the size of a house. Sand and grit flooded into the machine's internal gears. Bertha had essentially chewed herself apart from the inside.

The physical repairs took months. Resuscitating the project, the schedule, the budget, and the legal standing took years.

The $642 Million Question

Bertha finally completed her journey on April 4, 2017, roughly 2.5 years behind schedule. But finishing the tunnel was only the beginning of a different kind of excavation.

STP filed a $642 million claim against the state, arguing the hidden steel casing was the sole cause of the delay. It was one of the most dramatic legal battles regarding a capital project. It hinged on documents: specifically, on what the contractor knew, or should have known, before breaking ground.

Forensic schedule analysts combed through terabytes of project data. What they found was damning for the contractor: the existence and approximate location of the steel casing had been documented in the thousands of pages of reference materials provided during the bidding phase. The information was there. It had simply been buried in the data. The contractor was so eager to get the contract that it didn't stop to consider every single variable in its analysis.

A jury agreed. Instead of receiving a $642 million payout, the contractor was ordered to pay $57.2 million in damages for the delay.

Don't Wait for the Autopsy

The Bertha saga is usually told as an engineering story, a tale of machines and soil and buried pipes. But the real story is about information.

Every critical fact that could have prevented the crisis existed before Bertha ever started digging. The geological surveys were done. The well casing was documented. The risk was knowable. What was missing wasn't data. It was the discipline to synthesize it, the project controls architecture that turns thousands of pages of reference documents into actionable intelligence, and the forensic rigor that separates a $642 million liability from a $57.2 million judgment.

That gap between having data and actually seeing what it's telling you, that's where projects die. Not from bad engineering, but from bad visibility.

It's also exactly where Toll International LLC operates. We stress-test your risk register against the actual conditions of your project, not just filing it and moving on. It means maintaining a real-time schedule and cost data rigorous enough that when a stakeholder asks "where do we stand," the answer is grounded in fact, not optimism. And when the unexpected does happen, because on projects of this scale, it will, it means deploying forensic schedule analysis that can isolate the actual impact, separate the triggering event from the cascading failures, and produce the defensible documentation that turns a $642 million exposure into a $57.2 million recovery.

You don't have to wait for the autopsy to find out what went wrong. You can have that clarity from day one.

Toll International. We keep the project alive.

What is Critical Path Method in Construction?

Let's put it like this: It's Christmas Eve and you're cooking dinner. It's high stress, and guests are arriving in 4 hours. The clock is ticking.

NO worries, you have a perfect assembly line going:

  • You're prepping the bird.
  • Your wife is making the stuffing.
  • Your son is chopping the salad.

Everyone is working fast. You are efficient. You are actually ahead of schedule on the chopping and stuffing.

But when you turn to put the turkey in... the oven is cold. You forgot to turn it on.

This is the Critical Path. It doesn't matter that your son finished the salad 10 minutes early. It doesn't matter that the stuffing is perfect. The turkey requires 4 hours in a hot oven. Because the oven wasn't ready, dinner is now delayed by 30 minutes (the time it takes to preheat), and there is nothing the salad crew can do to fix it.

In construction, the "Cold Oven" is the Inspection. We can have the drywallers and painters standing by (the salad crew), but if the electrical inspection (the oven) isn't done, the project stops dead. That costs money.

No matter how efficient, organized, and hard-working your crews are, if you do not have the critical path to completion thoroughly mapped, your projects are vulnerable to catastrophe.

1. What is CPM Scheduling?

CPM Schedule is a tool that goes beyond a blueprint when it comes to planning. A blueprint tells you what you are building (walls, roof, sink). The CPM Schedule explains the logic for assembling it so you don't end up with a "cold oven" situation.

And you may ask, isn't that what calendars are for? Not really. A calendar is static; if you write "Dinner at 6:00 PM" on a calendar, it stays there even if you forget to turn on the oven. A CPM Schedule is dynamic. It links tasks together so that if "Preheat Oven" is delayed by 20 minutes, "Serve Dinner" automatically moves 20 minutes later. This way, you know the impact of even the tiniest delays ahead of time.

2. The Digital Tools

You cannot pull this off in Excel. You need software that understands relationships.

  • Oracle Primavera P6: The "NASA-grade" tool. Used for skyscrapers and airports. Complex, expensive, and powerful.
  • Microsoft Project: The standard for mid-sized commercial projects.
  • Procore / Smartsheet: Modern, cloud-based tools that keep the field crew connected.

Why it matters: If you move one task in Excel, you manually rewrite 500 dates. In CPM software, you move one task, and the system instantly recalculates the entire future of the project.

3. The Specialized Talent

This high complexity means not just anyone can manage this critical path. This is where you hire a Construction Scheduler or Project Controls Manager. This person is the Air Traffic Controller of your project.

  • The Superintendent is the Pilot flying the plane by managing the crews.
  • The Scheduler is the Air Traffic Controller monitoring radar to ensure two planes don't try to land on the same runway at the same time.

They ask the Superintendent: "How long will the framing take? What do you need before you start?" Then they build the logic map to prove if the deadline is actually achievable.

4. 4 Steps to Implementing CPM Scheduling

How do you actually build this "Cold Oven" warning system? It happens in four phases.

Step 1: The Brain Dump (WBS). You list every single ingredient and step required to build the project. You don't worry about the order yet; you just list them. Example: Pour Foundation, Frame Walls, Paint, Install Roof, Buy Windows.

Step 2: Sequencing. You connect the dots. You tell the software which task is the "Oven" and which is the "Turkey."

  • Rule: "Roof" cannot start until "Walls" are finished.
  • Rule: "Paint" cannot start until "Drywall" is finished.

Step 3: Estimating. You assign a time limit to each step. Example: Framing = 10 days. Painting = 5 days.

Step 4: The Calculation. You press the button. The software runs the math and tells you: "Based on your logic, you will finish on December 25th."

The Reality Check: If the software says you finish on January 10th, you know you have a problem before you even start building.

So what can you do? You now know that to avoid the "Cold Oven" disaster, you need two things:

  • The Recipe: Complex logic built into software like Oracle Primavera P6.
  • The Head Chef: A specialized Scheduler who knows how to write that recipe.

Here's the real question: if your framing crew finished early tomorrow, would your schedule automatically know what to pull forward? Or would that extra time just vanish into waiting?

That's the gap we help close here at Toll International. We don't see scheduling as an administrative task. We treat it as the project's central nervous system. Whether you need us to come in and build your entire CPM framework from scratch, or you simply need us to find you that top 1% scheduling talent that generic staffing agencies miss, we have the network and the technical pedigree to do it.

We have managed schedules for some of the most complex infrastructure and capital programs in the world for the past two decades. We know exactly how to spot the difference between a data-entry clerk and a true Construction Scheduler who can save you millions in delay claims.

Stop hoping the oven is warm when the guests arrive. If your project's critical path is unclear, we can map it, stress test it, and protect your completion date.

Learn more at tollintl.com

I Went Looking for Corporate Values and Found a Survival Story

When I first sat down to write about our core values at Toll International LLC, I hesitated. I found myself wondering: How can I turn something that is usually part of a dry corporate presentation into something our readers actually care about?

We all know the drill. Defining "core values" is usually a corporate, top-down exercise. It often involves conference rooms, whiteboards, and carefully selecting aspirational words like Integrity or Excellence to paint a picture of who a company hopes to be.

But as I delved into the past, digging through the 20-year history of Toll International, I realized that we didn't fit that mold. I found that the way we defined our values is actually a story full of drama, risk, and humanity. It's a story of fires, floods, and impossible deadlines.

It hit me; we didn't find our values. They found us. They were forged in the field, when things were going wrong, and we had to decide who we were going to be in that moment.

Here is how three specific moments in our history stopped being just "projects" and started defining who we are.

1. Responsiveness: The Fire at North River (2011)

It is one thing to be responsive when answering an email; it is entirely different to be responsive when the Hudson River is at risk.

In 2011, we were six years into our journey. We had secured major wins, including work at the World Trade Center, but our true character was tested on July 20th, when a four-alarm fire crippled the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The situation was critical. The plant was down, and raw sewage was being forced into the Hudson. A disaster like this usually triggers heavy bureaucracy, with budget and liability debates while the clock ticks. While others were stuck in the "who pays for what" phase, Nure Aiza Bezares, our founder, was on-site. We didn't wait for the paperwork to clear before offering help; we dove in. We utilized a Primavera P6-based control system to help organize the chaos and restore the plant.

That week taught us that Responsiveness is not about doing work quickly; it's about showing up when it's inconvenient, difficult, and yet, absolutely necessary.

2. Dependability: The "Impossible" Migration (2013-2016)

If you want to know what a company is made of, give them a job that everyone else is scared to touch.

Between 2013 and 2016, a top NYC education agency faced a nightmare scenario. They needed to migrate a massive, complex project ecosystem. The stakes were high, and the technical debt was massive. It was such a volatile knot of data that even Oracle, the creators of the software being used, refused to touch it. They essentially said, "Good luck, but we can't help you."

Many would claim the smart business move in this situation was to decline. Why risk our reputation on a project the manufacturer deemed too risky? But we had no intention of leaving our partners to deal with the issue alone. We took the job and then went a step further: we promised a migration with zero errors.

For months, our team meticulously unraveled, moved, tested, and rebuilt that ecosystem. When we crossed the finish line, we had delivered exactly what we promised: zero errors.

That project cemented Dependability as a core pillar of Toll. It proved that our word is iron. If we say we can do it, we do it, even when others say it's not possible.

3. Empathy: Rising Above the Flood (2017)

Engineering and construction management are often viewed as cold, calculating disciplines. We deal in concrete, steel, schedules, and risk registers. It's easy to forget that at the end of every Gantt chart is a human being trying to live their life.

After Superstorm Sandy, Southeast Queens was left reeling. Flooding was a daily reality for thousands of residents. Toll International was brought in to assist with critical initiatives, including the literal raising of streets to prevent future catastrophes, helping 60,000 people reclaim their households.

But the technical work was only half the battle. We helped process claims for hundreds of residents who needed to repair their homes. We realized then that our technical expertise meant nothing if it didn't serve the people behind the infrastructure.

Empathy became our lens. It transformed us from consultants who manage "projects" to partners who rebuild communities and seek to create a better world.

20 Years of Impact (2025)

From our founding on Halloween in 2005 to protecting the water supply at Hillview Reservoir in 2024, our journey has never been a straight line. It has been a series of challenges that demanded we evolve.

We learned Resilience in 2020, when we navigated a global pandemic, transitioned to a fully remote model, and still won the "Best Minority Technology Firm of the Year" award. We learned Ambition when we expanded our operations to Texas in 2022, proving that our East Coast expertise could thrive in the South.

Now, as we look beyond our 20th anniversary, I see our "Core Values" not as words on a slide, but as standards we live by. As something to leave behind in every project we touch.

Here is to the next 20 years of letting the work define the words!

The King Wanted More Guns. He Sank a Kingdom's GDP Instead.

It was the pride and joy of the King. The most powerful capital ship in the world. Five hundred sculptures and gold-covered ornaments carved into the hull. Sixty-four bronze cannons gleaming from two open gun decks. Intricate carvings of Roman emperors and Swedish lions covering her stern, painted in violent reds and golds to terrify the Polish enemy.

It took 400 workers, 40 acres of prime oak, and two years to complete. But finally, here she was, the Vasa, a Swedish ship to rule the seas, ready for her maiden voyage.

But why are we talking about a 17th-century warship in this newsletter? Because of what happened next.

The order is given and four sails unfurl. The canvas catches a light breeze, the ship moves, waves folding beneath her keel. Thirteen hundred meters later, the wind picks up... and she just tips over. Water rushes into the open gun ports. In minutes, the pride of the Swedish Empire vanishes beneath the grey water. Thirty men and women are dragged down with her, drowning less than a mile from the dock.

Five percent of the Kingdom of Sweden's GDP sank to the bottom that day.

What caused this? An enemy ship? A storm? The vengeful gods of the Baltic? None of that; it was bad management. A phenomenon we now call: The Vasa Syndrome.

The Vasa Syndrome

King Gustavus Adolphus originally approved a design for a single gun deck. But mid-construction, intelligence reports arrived: the Danes were building a bigger ship. He demanded a second gun deck. Heavier cannons. More statues.

The shipwright, Hein Jacobsson, trembled. The center of gravity was rising dangerously high. The hull was too narrow to support the new weight. A stability test proved it; thirty men running across the deck made the ship roll so violently that they had to stop for fear of capsizing in the harbor.

But the King wanted his guns. And no one dared tell him no. The schedule was tight. The budget literally a king's ransom. Production could not be stopped.

We See the Vasa Syndrome Every Day

We see it in the hospital wing that stalled for eighteen months because an MRI suite was added after the foundation was poured. We see it in the highway interchange that bleeds $40 million because the scope expanded faster than the risk assessment could track.

Every capital project carries the same temptation: just one more feature, just one more demand, just one more gun deck. And the same silence from the people who know better.

This is what Project Controls exists to prevent.

Many assume Project Controls is simply "scheduling," someone in a back room updating a Gantt chart. That's a mistake. If the Vasa shipwrights had a true Project Controls function, they would have saved the ship. Project Controls is the discipline of predictive navigation. It integrates time, cost, and scope to answer one question: Will this float?

Here is how it prevents the Vasa Syndrome:

Scope Management. When the King demanded a second gun deck, a Project Controls specialist would not have just said "Yes." They would have run a Change Order analysis demonstrating that adding weight without widening the hull or extending the timeline violates the project's physics. You quantify the impact of "just one more feature" before it gets approved.

Risk Management. The Vasa sank because no one planned for the wind. In modern projects, we call this Sensitivity Analysis. Monte Carlo simulations model thousands of possible "breezes," labor shortages, material delays, and regulatory changes. You calculate the probability of capsizing and determine exactly how much ballast you need to survive the storm.

Cost Engineering. Sweden burned 5% of its GDP on a sunk cost. Earned Value Management doesn't just tell you what you spent; it tells you what you got for that money. You track the burn rate so you can see the cliff months before you run out of timber.

The Framework That Speaks to Power

The tragedy of the Vasa was not that the design was bad. It was that the data was ignored. The shipwrights knew the ship was unstable, but they lacked the framework to communicate that reality to the King.

Toll International LLC provides that framework. We are the interface between engineering reality and stakeholder vision. We provide the stability test for your capital project. When we manage a program, we ensure that the ambition of the design matches the physics of the budget and schedule.

History is expensive. A good schedule is cheap.

The Vasa still sits in a museum in Stockholm, preserved in her failure for four centuries. Your project doesn't have to.

Find us at www.tollintl.com

Inside the $1.8 Billion Bet to Keep Manhattan Above Water

In October 2012, Superstorm Sandy pushed 43 million gallons of brackish water into the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in a matter of minutes. The Atlantic became a hydraulic battering ram. Electrical substations went under. The lower half of Manhattan went dark.

That figure, 43 million gallons, is no longer a historical statistic. It is now a design parameter. The New York City Panel on Climate Change projects local sea levels could rise between 15 and 75 inches by 2100. The width of that band is the part that matters to builders. It means engineers cannot solve for a single elevation target. They have to solve for a range, with margin, against a clock that runs in decades.

For a city built on an archipelago of soft fill and tidal estuaries, coastal inundation has stopped being a policy debate. It is a constraint sheet. To meet the constraint, New York is doing something no American city has attempted at this scale. It is rebuilding its coastline.

The Fortress Hidden in a Park

The most visible front of this campaign runs two and a half miles along Manhattan's eastern edge. The East Side Coastal Resiliency project, budgeted at $1.8 billion, is a masterclass in disguised fortification.

Engineers are raising the ground itself by up to ten feet, locking the new elevation in place with deep-driven steel sheet piles, and threading a subterranean spine of reinforced concrete floodwalls through the soil. Where the berm meets a roadway or a pedestrian crossing, the wall would otherwise have to break. So the project hides its mechanical organs inside the landscape.

Roller gates weighing thousands of pounds, some stretching 77 feet long, sit retracted out of sight in their housings. They deploy across the gap only when a storm approaches. It is a medieval siege defense system, motorized for the 21st century and buried under a public park.

The Reef That Builds Itself

Rigid walls have a known weakness. They do not destroy a wave's kinetic energy. They redirect it. The water that bounces off Manhattan's new floodwall has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a neighboring stretch of coast with weaker defenses.

That weakness is why the Living Breakwaters project off the southern tip of Staten Island has abandoned the concrete wall entirely. Engineers are placing submerged ridges of rock and ecologically enhanced concrete on the ocean floor. These structures function as speed bumps for the Atlantic. They force waves to break further offshore, bleeding off destructive velocity before the water ever reaches the beach.

The breakwaters are also seeded with live oysters. As the oysters grow and calcify across the substrate, the structure gains mass, gains adhesion, gains resilience. It is a rare specimen of civil infrastructure that gets stronger over time without human intervention.

The Half That Lives Underground

Building fortresses on the shoreline accomplishes nothing if the city rots from underneath. The subterranean nervous system of New York, its subway tunnels, its electrical feeders, its sewer mains, was built for the climate of 1920.

The MTA is now installing submarine-grade watertight doors on ventilation grates, deploying Kevlar water-catchment curtains inside flood-prone stations, and elevating critical electrical equipment above projected surge lines. Above ground, utilities are carving the centralized grid into smaller, defensible territories. Localized microgrids are being installed across vulnerable neighborhoods, designed to island themselves the moment a surge severs the main feeders. The principle is the same one warship designers have used for a century: compartmentalization. Lose a section, save the ship.

This is the largest urban retrofit in modern American history. Marine biology, heavy steel fabrication, hydrology, geotechnical engineering, electrical distribution, civil construction, and public space design, all converging on the same shoreline at the same time, all answering to the same set of climate parameters.

Where the Project Actually Lives or Dies

A project of this complexity does not execute itself. The architectural renderings are settled. The capital is committed. The political coalitions, fragile as they are, have held long enough to break ground. The remaining variable is execution. And execution is where projects of this magnitude usually fail.

A 77-foot roller gate is useless if its concrete sill shifts by half an inch during the cure. A microgrid fails commissioning if a single lithium-ion shipment slips by a month. An ESCR floodwall segment becomes a legal liability if a subcontractor's daily report cannot survive scrutiny three years later in arbitration.

The visionary work has already been done. What remains is the unromantic, granular labor of holding hundreds of moving pieces in tolerance, on schedule, and on budget, across multiple contractors and decades of construction. This is the work that decides whether a city like New York floods or holds.

At Toll International LLC, this is where we sit. As a construction project management consultancy working for some of the largest institutions in the city and other major regional clients, we specialize in the cost estimation, scheduling, controls, and field-level oversight that translate blueprints into built infrastructure. We are the layer between the engineer's design and the contractor's steel. The layer where the project lives or dies.

The water is coming. The engineering exists. The execution is the only variable left.

W.02 · Toll International · Web

Website Copy (Wix)

On-site copy written for Toll International's Wix-built website. It is the same copy later reviewed in the diagnostic audit below. Click any screenshot to zoom.

W.03 · Toll International · Strategy

Diagnostic Presentation (English)

Website content & UX audit prepared for Toll International. Recreated in English from the original Spanish-language deck; quoted website copy is the actual English text being critiqued.

Diagnostic: Toll International Website

Three areas were reviewed:

  • 01 · Message. Evaluation of the clarity, effectiveness, and persuasive power of the content. Assesses whether the narrative connects emotionally with the user and communicates the value proposition with impact.
  • 02 · User Experience. Analysis of navigability and information architecture. Evaluates the site's ability to guide the user intuitively, letting them find solutions without friction or effort.
  • 03 · Presentation. Assessment of aesthetic impact and visual coherence. Examines whether the design projects innovation, professionalism, and trust, aligning visually with the brand's identity.

01 · Message: Diagnosis

The site presents dense messaging that makes it hard to understand what the company actually offers. The content focuses on internal credentials rather than client benefits, and service descriptions are inconsistent from page to page. The language is abstract and lacks a simple, direct value proposition. The visual sections don't explain results or impact, which weakens positioning and makes the overall experience confusing.

Header

The header centers on the company itself and lacks a clear, results-oriented value proposition. By leaning on acronyms and abstract language, it forces visitors to decode the text just to understand what Toll actually does.

Dense, hard-to-read copy. By stacking too many ideas without a pause, the text becomes tiring and doesn't let the user skim it at a glance.

Generic and interchangeable. Many consulting firms use similar language. Nothing here communicates Toll International's unique strengths, experience, or differentiation. The phrase "We're On Target" doesn't reveal anything meaningful about its mission, capabilities, or identity.

Ambiguity. The phrase "reach a higher level" is vague. It needs to define what this means in specific, tangible terms for the client.

Suggested rewrite: "Project and program controls for complex public infrastructure. We help agencies and utilities deliver capital projects on time, on budget, and in compliance, backed by certified MBE/DBE/SBE status and bilingual expertise."

Syntax & Voice

Repetitive syntax. Every description starts with "We" (We have, We ensure, We help), which makes the reading experience tedious.

Excessive credential density. While the academic history and certifications add technical credibility, the text is too dense, forcing decision-makers to read through several paragraphs before finding the key benefits or differentiators.

Condense the bio. Recommend summarizing the bio into a high-level paragraph (3 to 4 lines) with a "Read full bio" expandable option for those who want the details.

Highlight the brand promise. The key phrase "1 day early and 1 dollar under budget" should be visually pulled out as a quote or pull-quote, rather than left buried inside a paragraph.

Passive voice. Phrases like "consistently being met" and "assist you with" dilute the impact of the services.

Additional Problems

Unusual, academic language. Phrases like "socio-cultural value" and "sector-overarching links" are complex and unnatural; they could be simplified into friendlier, more direct phrasing like: "We connect public and private partners to share knowledge."

Redundancy and weak syntax. The current sentence repeats "project" twice and uses heavy connectors ("whom we know will help us") that interrupt the reading flow.

Suggested rewrite: "We establish relationships with selected partners we know will help create added value for your project."

Typos, and archaic, heavy constructions. Could read instead: "Toll led and coordinated the overall redevelopment program at JFK Airport."

02 · User Experience

There's a critical mismatch between the services listed on the homepage and the "Services" page, which confuses the value offering. The "Our Projects" section loses relevance by being relegated to a lower carousel with dense descriptions and no focus on results. Beyond that, the navigation lacks intuitiveness, making it hard for clients to find key elements like proof of success and validation. On top of that, the absence of clear, visible calls to action from the start hurts conversion, forcing visitors to work to understand the value proposition.

SEO

Toll International uses a fundamentally sound SEO baseline. The site handles technical elements well, like HTTPS security and tagging, and ranks for its own brand. However, it lacks a solid content strategy. In essence, it's visible to people who search for it specifically, but it relies on passive relevance rather than actively competing for new traffic in the sector.

To adopt an aggressive strategy, Toll needs to activate a content engine that consistently produces optimized articles and news. That output, combined with programmatic landing pages, signals active relevance. The key benefit is market dominance: by casting a wider net across searches, the company secures qualified leads and cements itself as the definitive authority.

Action Recommendations

03 · Presentation. Overall, the site's visual identity is well executed and conveys professionalism, experience, and boldness. However, long blocks of text without visual support or rich formatting (bold, italics, etc.), combined with a lack of multimedia content on interior pages, take away from what could be a much more emotionally resonant experience.

Text blocks with no visual support compound the problem across interior pages.

Typography shortfalls. The use of small fonts compromises readability, while abrupt size changes (body text) break visual harmony. The lack of supporting graphic elements prevents fluid reading and emotional connection with the user.

Low image resolution. Non-optimized images were found with a pixelated appearance. This lack of definition projects low quality and undermines the site's professional credibility.

W.04 · Toll International · Strategy

Diagnostic Presentation (Original, Spanish)

The original 13-slide deck as designed and presented to Toll International. Scroll the strip, click any slide to zoom.

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W.05 · The layer behind the pieces

Content Strategy & Planning

Beyond individual pieces, Leo owns the strategic layer behind them. Topics are prioritized through SEO keyword research, weighing search volume against competition to focus effort where it counts. Multi-format content calendars covering image, video, article, and text posts are planned and tracked from concept and copy through asset production to publish status. Leo has also led strategic website audits covering UX, content architecture, and brand narrative for stakeholder review. Details available on request.

Toll International

LinkedIn and Instagram posts for a NYC-based construction project management consultancy. Leo wrote the copy for every post shown here, directed or edited most of the accompanying creative with the team, and manages the calendar these posts publish on.

S.01 · LinkedIn · Video post

Brooks' Law

Leo wrote the copy; video editing on this one was a team effort.

Throwing more people at a delayed project won't save it: it'll likely make it worse.

Welcome to Brooks' Law: where adding manpower to a late schedule just creates a massive communication bottleneck.

You can't panic your way back on track. Toll International LLC's fix?

  1. Precise Critical Path Management
  2. Strategic Resource Leveling

Manage by precision, not headcount. Follow Toll International for more project management truths!

S.02 · LinkedIn · Image post

Critical Path

Leo wrote the copy; graphic design on this one was a team effort.

Critical Path graphic

Every massive build is a race against time and complexity. From the initial strategic blueprint to the final handover, identifying and managing the Critical Path is what separates a chaotic site from a streamlined operation.

At Toll International LLC, we don't just track your progress; we architect it. We illuminate the path forward, helping you navigate complexities so you can focus on building what matters.

Let's build the future, together.

S.03 · Instagram · Image post

From Chaos to Clarity

Leo wrote the copy; graphic design on this one was a team effort.

From Chaos to Clarity graphic

In capital projects, one bottleneck triggers a chain reaction. We build the safeguards.

Predict. Protect. Deliver.

S.04 · Instagram · Image post

From Foundation to Finish

Leo wrote the copy; graphic design on this one was a team effort.

From Foundation to Finish graphic

We don't just talk about reliability; we live it.

Owner-side. Day or night. We win or lose together.

Spoiler alert: we deliver.

20 years in the game prove it.

Earlier Work · Grupo Nuu

Social content produced during Leo's time at Grupo Nuu, a Mexican marketing agency, for clients including Monarcas and IZZI.

S.05 · Grupo Nuu · Liga MX

Monarcas Morelia

Social media content and community management for Monarcas Morelia, a Mexican first-division soccer club, produced as part of the account team at Grupo Nuu. Click to zoom.

S.06 · Grupo Nuu · Interior design

Spacio Cocinas

Social media graphic content produced for Spacio's kitchen and interior design line, part of Grupo Nuu's account work. Click to zoom.

S.07 · Grupo Nuu · Telecom

IZZI

Social media graphic content produced for IZZI, a Mexican telecom brand, as part of Grupo Nuu's account work on the client's promotional and offer-driven campaigns. Click to zoom.

Toll International

NYC-based construction project management consultancy. Leo writes the company newsletter and produces supporting social video alongside it.

V.01 · Social video

New York

Short-form video edited for Toll International's social channels, part of the ongoing social media content Leo produces alongside the newsletter.

V.02 · Recruitment

OpenText Recruitment

Recruitment video produced to support a client hiring campaign, part of Toll International's talent placement services.

V.03 · Brand film

What We Do

Company overview video summarizing Toll International's services for prospective clients and partners.

V.04 · Vertical · YouTube / TikTok

Shorts

Vertical short-form video for Toll International. Leo handled the concept, script, production, and parallel publishing on YouTube Shorts and TikTok.

Short 01
Short 02
Short 03

Earlier Work · Grupo Nuu

Mexican marketing agency where Leo's role shifted daily between community management, motion graphics, and on-set production for clients including Monarcas, IZZI, Spacio, and Luis Garcia Media.

V.05 · Agency reel

Grupo Nuu Reel

Compilation reel spanning Luis Garcia Media, Monarcas, and other agency clients, where the work shifted daily between community management, motion graphics, and on-set production.

V.06 · Product film

Spacio Cocinas

Product video filmed and edited for Spacio's kitchen and interior design line, part of Grupo Nuu's client work.

V.07 · Motion graphics

Campañas Audiovisuales

Audiovisual campaign work for Spacio, including a motion graphics logo reveal Leo animated and produced.

Freelance Motion Graphics

Independent motion graphics projects completed outside full-time roles.

V.08 · Freelance

Bayer · Promotional Motion Graphics

Motion graphics promotional video Leo planned, animated, and produced independently as a freelance project for Bayer.

V.09 · Freelance

E-Ticket · Promotional Motion Graphics

Motion graphics promotional video Leo animated and produced independently as a freelance project for E-Ticket.