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Dee Brown works on projects of all sizes and levels of complexity, such as the American Airlines Center, pictured above.
Dallas-based masonry contractor Dee Brown has grown 200 percent in the last five years – a feat President Rob Barnes attributes to aggressive diversification and continuously impressive performance. The company’s mission is to provide customer satisfaction through dedication, reliability and integrity while producing the highest-quality product at the lowest-possible cost, it says – and it seems to be achieving this.
In a recent interview with U.S. Business Review, Barnes discussed the 54-year-old company’s strategies to weather the economic downturn, as well as its new markets.
U.S. Business Review: To what would you attribute Dee Brown’s growth?
Rob Barnes: There are really probably several reasons. One is, we’re focused on working in more market segments than we had been previously. We expanded into upper-end residential and into specialty areas (such as) art-sculpture-type work. In 2000, we began focusing on expansion into different market arenas, not doing just the traditional brick and block masonry or cut stone. We are currently working more diversely within our region, focusing more on optimizing and leveraging existing relationships, growing locally not geographically.
When you’re able to focus all of your strengths in one area, you’re able to utilize all your key people in one area rather than spreading out. Information sharing becomes easier.
Our growth was tied to market expansion over more market segments. In Texas we did go from around $16 million to over $32 million from ’04 to ’07.
USBR: How do you get enough qualified labor?
RB: There’s been a lot of change within our company over the last 15 years. For one, we transitioned to a 100 percent non-union company and that made it more challenging to work in some of the other, bigger markets across the country. As a union contractor, I could send in key management people to do work from Texas and have a local work force built. As a non-union company, we don’t have that. It is harder to find qualified non-union help in other market areas, in some instances due to lack of strong apprentice training programs.
I think there’s been a change in the culture of people doing actual stone setting and bricklaying, and labor as well is less willing to be moved around. Their region of the Texas area has sustained enough growth that their worker mentality has shifted and become more sedimentary.
The Southwest and South-central region has been a pretty stable market area. By diversification and spreading ourselves out, it makes us a little more resistant to the downturn. (We were) carrying, in ’08, a relatively similar backlog that we had in ’07. This has changed more in ’09 and although we’re down from ’08, I really think we’ll get out [of ’09] close to the same number.
We attribute this to our diversification. If we were focused on a purely commercial market we’d be hurting right now. We’ve been around since 1955 and have been put into a niche. We are often seen as the big project contractor who built American Airlines Center and are currently installing the stonework on the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium. While we do fit this mold, we try to stress that we work on projects of any size and complexity. Without projects of all sizes, it makes maintaining a level work force very difficult.
Our success is also based on our performance and our people. Not everyone can build a $10 to $12 million job. But, we have to have different sizes and types of work to be able to fit the various strengths and weaknesses of our personnel.
USBR: What new markets have you moved into?
RB: We’ve gotten heavily into university work. It’s not a new market for us but we’ve been really focused on getting into that market recently. We also focused more heavily on the medical sector, as well as governmental and institutional. Really, it is market segment growth in a whole lot more areas that has enabled us to get where we are and maintain it. We’re feeling the drop like everyone else.
USBR: What sets you apart from the competition?
RB: Because our main market segment is price-sensitive, you can be the best company in the world and can put the highest products in place and deliver it on schedule – but if you’re not competitive, you’re not getting the work. We haven’t been a company for almost 54 years now because we didn’t take care of business. We have a lot of repeat business and we have a lot of long-term clients.
Focusing on taking care of them has been a key initiative that we try to push throughout the organization. Our relationships and our positive, solutions-based management is how we’re not only going to retain the clients we do have but hopefully grow that client base.
Just looking back over history – really we’ve kept relationships with clients for a long time. I know of some relationships that go back 35 to 40 years that are still strong, with general contractors we work with. There are supplier relationships we have, going the other direction, that go back 20, 25, 30 years. That just speaks to our commitment to not only take care of the clients – the end-user of the product – but the people that help us get there; the people that fabricate stone materials for us; the people that make the brick.
USBR: How do you train your employees?
RB: We’re really focused on training and have really embraced the green movement and LEED programs. We’ve gotten all of our estimating people, all of our project management and all of our key field operations managers through the green advantage certification.
We have a safety initiative we put into play in September (2008), where we all took a minimum of the OSHA 10-hour course. After first taking it myself, it was required of all estimators; all operations managers and foremen were required to take the OSHA 30 hour course. Their exposure to unsafe conditions is heightened requiring the heightened awareness.
(This effort) is basically saying that, look, we all know (safety is) important. But it’s going to be more than important now, because we’ve put additional things in place in the field, like a job hazard analysis survey first thing every day on every job.
We’re just making (workers) aware of their surroundings every day and trying to really minimize the injuries and make these guys take responsibility for wanting this to be part of our culture.
USBR: What do you see in the future for Dee Brown?
RB: One of the things I’ve been really focusing on is trying to do what we already do well, better. We must continue to try to grow horizontally in our own marketplace, not stretch our key resources by being in too many different geographic areas.
And – it may sound simple – but I think where we are going to see continued growth is in strengthening our existing market segments. Opportunities will present themselves. It is our responsibility to identify and seize these opportunities.
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