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As seen in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch May 2, 2003 HAVE TOOLS WILL TRAVEL St. Louis boasts an abundance of specialty-construction companies that tap into the area’s high-skill workers and put their talents on display across the country. BY JACK NAUDI Electrical contractors, roofers, bricklayers, ironworkers and drywall hangers don’t go around bragging about their work. Most are too concerned about the next job, which can be elusive in the up-and-down world of construction. What they don’t say – and many don’t realize – is that the metro area’s specialty contractors or subcontractors have built a collective powerhouse. Each year, Engineering News Record, a construction-industry trade publication, ranks the top 600 specialty contractors nationwide. In the fall 2002 list, 25 companies from the St. Louis area made the cut – all from Missouri. To put that number in perspective, less than 1 percent of the nation’s population lives in the metro area, but more than 4 percent of the top specialty contractors are based here. How is it that St. Louis is home to so many large construction companies? That’s a question some debate in the St. Louis construction community, yielding few concrete answers. It’s likely that there’s no single answer. But many of the top 25 share several common traits.
“You’ve seen a little more fragmentation in other markets,” Toenjes said. “We’ve got a traditional market, where we have a lot of second- and third-generation firms.” One that’s typical of the group is Murphy Co. of Overland, formed in 1907. It’s one of the nation’s leading mechanical-contracting companies. Its senior vice president, Patrick Murphy Jr., is a great-grandson of the founder and a University of Notre Dame graduate who studied finance. “It’s an interesting question,” Murphy said about how St. Louis came to have so many large specialty contractors. “We have a very skilled labor pool.” The only universal answer from the contracting companies and others is that St. Louis is blessed with highly skilled, almost exclusively unionized trade workers. The city is the home of the first local in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. IBEW Local 1 was formed in 1891; today, it boasts 5,500 members who work for companies like Sachs Electric, Guarantee Electrical, Payne-Crest Electric and Aschinger Electric Co. Though the unions and companies spent much of the 20th century fighting each other, the last 20 years have been relatively peaceful. In fact, the IBEW and the large electrical-contracting companies have worked closely to recruit new employees, to train them and to get them working. “We have tended to develop some very strong companies utilizing those talents,” said Doug Martin, executive vice president of the St. Louis Chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association. Steve Schoemehl, business manager of IBEW Local 1, said: “It only stands to reason to me that an owner, someone who is going to invest dollars in construction, wants a skilled, highly trained work force. They want them built correctly.” There’s no objective measure of workmanship, so there’s no way of comparing St. Louis specialty contractors with those from Chicago or Houston or Boston, but Gary Frossard is confident that quality prevails in St. Louis. “When I go out of town, I’m always looking at buildings and picking them apart,” said Frossard, president of Kadean Construction, a general-contracting company in Fenton. “I’m sure everyone is biased to their own city . . . But you see stuff that would never be acceptable here.” Toenjes credits the area’s large general-contracting companies, such as McCarthy Building Cos., Alberici Constructors and Clayco Construction Co. Those companies know the local subcontractors and take many of them on the road. “We have a (subcontractors) group that travels with us all over,” said Kirk Warden, vice president of Clayco. “We try our hardest to bring in local people. But we also tell them that the power we bring is if you’ve got terrible drywallers in your market, we have the ability to bring in a national drywall guy so you can get a higher-quality project.” Frossard, who works almost exclusively in the St. Louis area, said he appreciates the wealth of companies from which to choose. So do his customers. “It’s a good thing. It creates competition, which obviously helps provide good economy for a job. It kind of makes them more service-oriented with quality construction,” he said. The reputation for quality is critical in getting more work, especially outside the St. Louis area. Subcontractors large enough to make the Engineering News Record list probably can’t exist on St. Louis work alone. Most have to “travel,” the euphemism for doing work outside a home base. Not that all want to travel. “If we could, we would have all of our work in St. Louis,” said Larry Walker, executive vice president of Sachs Electric in Fenton. Traveling is a headache because it typically means company engineers and project managers have to be away from their families for long periods. But like the other subcontractors, Sachs has little choice. About half the company’s business comes from beyond St. Louis. The traveling began about 30 years ago, when Ralston-Purina, impressed with the company’s work locally, asked it to work at facilities not only around the country, but also overseas. The initial experience, Walker said “gave us the confidence and skill sets necessary to be able to execute a project away from our hometown headquarters.” Rather than travel, many St. Louis subcontractors have set up branches in cities where they have strong repeat business. For example, The Western Group of Overland was formed in 1915, and for about 50 years, it was strictly a St. Louis company specializing in masonry and concrete restoration. But it couldn’t rely on St. Louis business alone to grow. It had to expand its customer base, and constantly traveling around the country was unwieldy. So, it started opening branches. “Our biggest geographical growth spurt was in the ‘70s,” said Bill Bishop, the company’s president. Today, it has 35 offices, most of which operate independently, working with local tradespeople. Only about 10 percent of Western’s business comes out of St. Louis. The company could have headquarters anywhere, but Bishop, the grandson of the founder, said he has no plans of leaving St. Louis. “This is home,” he said. It’s also a place where strong bonds have formed among the specialty-contracting companies. “Sure, we’ll bid the job, and we’re trying to beat our competitors,” said Bill Brown, president of Ben Hur Construction Co., a steel-erection company in Earth City. “But after it's all over, you can call your competitor on the phone and say: ‘Hey, I got this job. Can I rent a crane from you?’ Everybody in this town really tries to work together.” A closer look at the industry
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