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Firm Profile: Swinerton Inc. November/December 2008 Building Outside The Box After 120 years, Swinerton is still innovating, hiring solid young talent and pushing hard for sustainability By Tom Nicholson
San Francisco contracting partners Charles Lindgren and Lewis Hicks saw their business skyrocket after the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake, which destroyed more than 28,000 buildings, most of them made of wood. In 1888 the two men pioneered the use of steel-reinforced concrete as an alternative to wood construction and offered their expertise to help the city rebuild with innovative, quake-resistant materials. That first incarnation of their company, now called Swinerton Inc. after former Chairman A.B. Swinerton, established a legacy of innovation that continues to characterize the general contractor today.
With 16 offices spanning the West—from San Francisco to Houston to Honolulu—the 1,300-employee firm cranks out nearly $2 billion a year in commercial core-and-shell and tenant improvements. Swinerton Inc. includes several subsidiaries within its family of companies, such as Swinerton Builders, providing general contracting in the western states; Lyda Swinerton, which does general contracting in Texas and New Mexico; Swinerton Management and Consulting, the firm’s $4-billion a year construction-management arm; and Swinerton Property Services, which provides property management in the Denver area. “We pride ourselves on being a ‘general’ general contractor,” says Gary Rafferty, Swinerton’s chief operating officer. The broad range of general contracting capabilities “gives us a flexibility to adapt to a changing marketplace.”
Flexibility and innovation are “survival,” Rafferty says. “We want our guys to be entrepreneurial. We encourage innovation.” Swinerton’s managers aren’t merely encouraged to think outside the box. “We want them to open the box up and flip the box inside out and around,” Rafferty adds. The firm began recycling project waste long before doing so was called green, and it integrated building information modeling and virtual design and construction as core tools well ahead of its industry peers. “We’ve always pushed the envelope,” says Jeff Hoopes, Swinerton president. “We began thinking green two decades ago when we became concerned with the amount of waste our projects were generating and started recycling drywall, wood and metal.”
In 1994 the firm was selected to build Gap Inc.’s headquarters in San Francisco, a seminal project to showcase green construction. Designed by renowned architect and green proponent William McDonough, the building featured a green roof and daylighting components a decade ahead of others around the country. Swinerton won that contract “because our passion for green was evident,” Hoopes says. By 2001, before the industrywide embrace of green construction, “we held a seminar with industry peers to promote an initiative to begin building in more environmentally conscious ways,” he says. “Since then, we’ve pushed our clients to build green.” Open and Competitive
The progressiveness is bolstered by old-school values that Rafferty says boil down to “hustle and hard work. You have to out hustle the competition. One question I always ask job candidates and recruits is, “Are you competitive?” The flexibility the firm extols applies as much to people as it does to project capabilities and business strategies. Teamwork and an environment in which employees are “encouraged to be open and candid with one another” is paramount to Swinerton’s work culture, Rafferty says. Rafferty adds that one of the firm’s strengths is a willingness among senior managers to learn new technologies from college graduates, whom he calls “rising superstars.”
Recruiting from colleges and universities throughout California and Texas, “We keep bringing in new engineers, and to be a good manager, you have to be willing to listen to them. You temper it, but you listen,” says Hoopes. Hoopes, a 25-year employee who started at the firm as an estimator, says managers are recruited largely from colleges and groomed for upper-management positions. “When we hire experienced managers from outside the firm, it almost never works because they don’t know the culture,” says Hoopes, whose two sons have recently graduated from college and joined the firm. “We grow the managers up from kids. We were all kids when we started working here.” Other examples are 25-year employees Rafferty and Executive Vice President Charles Kuffner, the 35-year tenure of CEO Mike Re, and Chairman Gordon Marks, 40 years. “We’ve known each other all our lives, like family,” Hoopes says. “It’s a culture that’s all about teamwork, and it doesn’t work for everyone, but it has worked for me, and that’s why I have stayed,” says Rafferty. Community Focused Through the Swinerton Foundation, the firm donates nearly $500,000 a year to charitable causes. “We push our employees to be involved in charity,” Rafferty says. He says the passion to help society comes through in construction within communities, too. “It looks good to have huge projects in your resume, but it’s the community projects that really make you feel good,” he says.
An example is the $7-million Puente Learning Center, built in 1998 in east Los Angeles for underprivileged people in the neighborhood. The project “really helped people, and that’s what makes your job worthwhile,” Rafferty says. Hoopes says the country’s uncertain economic future has affected the firm, like many of its competitors. “Projects are stopping,” he says. “We’ve had owners delaying jobs, and there is already quite a lot of impact. But I think we’re prepared.” Optimism about the future prevails for a firm that in its 120-year history has weathered nearly every market condition. “Like everyone, we are going to have to be innovative and hustle and find our way through it,” Rafferty says. “One thing I can tell you about this firm is that we have the will to win.”
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