Areaya Yohannes
Senior Advisor, Energy & Sustainability
Areaya Yohannes founded Lombard Exteriors in 2015 and built it into a national facility management and construction firm working in more than 40 states. Lombard is a national preferred vendor to Extra Space Storage, CubeSmart, Public Storage, Life Storage, O’Reilly Auto Parts and Life Time. It won CubeSmart’s national lighting contract in 2019 and has delivered federal work for the Pentagon, U.S. Southern Command and the U.S. Postal Service, including a $3.5 million USPS site package in Florida. At Maye, he leads the energy and sustainability practice, building on Lombard’s LED retrofit and utility-audit work for clients including Johns Hopkins.
Before founding Lombard, he spent more than a decade in public policy and government. He was a research fellow for the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, a bipartisan panel whose members included Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Zoellick, and for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He later served as Policy Director at the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, as Assistant Director of Procurement for the City of Norfolk, where he also led the city’s transportation policy, and, after selection for FEMA’s accelerated leadership program, as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the FEMA Administrator.
He began his career in Prudential’s three-year PACE analyst management program and in investment banking. He holds a J.D. with a concentration in corporate law from American University Washington College of Law. As a law student, he was a summer law clerk to Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, who later became Chief Judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals, and worked in the International Enforcement division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.