Honing In

Specialty contractors

Sharpen Skills For Market Niches

By Rindi White

Every construction company launches with a single project. How companies evolve from there depends on the market, clients, and the inclination of the owners. While diversity has its strength, for some construction companies, specialization has laid out a path for success.

Denali General Contracting, as the name implies, is not a specialist, yet the Anchorage-based company boasts a specialty: it’s prepared for projects in rural Alaska. Remote work takes a special skill set—advanced logistics, excellent attention to detail and, above all, a love for working in rural Alaska.

“You have to be prepared, you have to be organized, you have to be comfortable in that environment, and your team needs to be comfortable in that environment,” says Chris Hamre, president of Denali General.

At a job site in Anchorage, not having a tool or part can be fixed with a trip to the hardware store. Working remotely, small errors like that can cost time and significantly more money.

Making a rural project successful boils down to good planning, Hamre says. Ideally, projects are bid and planned over winter; Hamre’s goal is to have materials delivered dockside in Seattle by April, ready for a May shipment to Alaska and then consolidated for barges to the project site. The first barge has items for excavation and pouring concrete, and each subsequent shipment should contain materials needed for the next steps of the project. Hopefully everything arrives according to schedule and the work plan; if not, and the last barge of the year is missed, items might have to come via air freight or, in extreme cases, a plane might need to be chartered.

The timing of materials and equipment is key, but so is building a strong team, Hamre says. It’s easiest to work with people who are comfortable working a remote job; the hours are long, and the uninitiated might find it difficult to be away from home for a longer stretch.

Hamre says Denali General, celebrating its 40th year in business, has been working in rural Alaska for about thirty years, starting with a project in Bethel. Lessons were learned through that project, he says, including better planning for housing. Hamre has since purchased man camps that can be set up at some rural job sites, or he looks for local housing on others. Making sure workers are well rested and well fed is critical, he says.

A roof renovation at Goldenview Middle School in South Anchorage initially called for a complete tear-off, but Alaska Roof Restorations used thermal imaging to determine only 2,000 of 100,000 square feet needed replacement. The rest of the roof was given a monolithic slab covering to extend its useful life by another twenty years.

“When a guy gets on a plane, we are responsible for him until he gets back off the plane in Anchorage. Those guys are working hard—we make sure they have a warm bed and a good meal,” he says.

Top of the Field

Roofing is already a specialized craft. Alaska Roof Restorations occupies an even narrower niche: the company repairs and restores flat, low-slope, and metal roofs, saving owners the cost and waste of completely reroofing a building.

“We’re the only ones that do specifically what we do; there are other companies out there spraying roofs—we restore the roof assembly and the surface,” says Tyler Moor, president and founder of Alaska Roof Restorations.

Moor is a painter by trade, working in Alaska since 2014, and he also runs a drywall company. He says he started coating roofs to restore membranes and metal roofs, but the process evolved over time. His method currently involves assessing the damage on a roof—through collecting cores or thermal imaging—and repairing those sections before creating a new fluid-applied membrane over the whole roof that will last twenty to twenty-five years.

“We primarily restore commercial and industrial roofs,” Moor says. “The other roof that lends itself to what we do is… the pre-engineered metal buildings with the roof fastened onto the structure. If you have a large, pre-engineered metal building, you have thousands of fasteners. As roofs move, those fasteners tend to come loose.”

In the case of a flat roof—like the roof on Goldenview Middle school in South Anchorage, which the company restored in 2020—a roof might have a few wet, damaged areas that must first be identified, cut out and repaired with new wood, insulation, and cover board. Then the whole roof is covered in a thick, seamless monolithic polyurea base coat; silicone coating is applied as the top coat. The silicone coating alone can extend the life of the roof fifteen to twenty years, he says.

For the middle school, a full roof tear-off and replacement was initially planned. Moor’s analysis revealed that only about 2,000 square feet of the 100,000-square-foot roof was damaged and in need of replacement, so just those areas were repaired and the whole roof recoated, resulting in a significant cost savings to the Anchorage School District. When the roof reaches the end of its next life cycle, he says, the top coat can be reapplied, creating a renewable roof system that will never need to be torn off again.

The restoration system Moor uses is fairly new to Alaska, although it is used all over the world, often in northern climates. His company has used the system throughout Alaska, from Southeast to Nome, both on and off the road system.

Create Your Own Options

Contractors that supply parts and equipment can specialize by focusing on an elite customer base. Palmerbased Triverus began with exactly fourteen possible customers, namely the nations that operate aircraft carriers, of which there are only fortyseven afloat in the world. Triverus manufactures machines that clean the decks of aircraft carriers. The company started in a two-car garage in Anchorage’s Muldoon neighborhood, responding to a federal Small Business

Innovation Research Program announcement requesting a unique innovation to keep decks of aircraft carriers clean while also restoring the friction necessary to allow jets to safely take off and land. The innovation also needed to prevent pollution—not wash dripped fuel or chemicals into the ocean as part of the cleaning process, for example.

Just getting taken seriously was a challenge, says Triverus CEO Hans Vogel. The company submitted a white paper outlining its proposed solution, but it wasn’t until it could show a 3D model that Triverus was seen as a legitimate contender. The company won an award to build a prototype in 2001, followed by several years of intermittent funding and other obstacles before it achieved a working machine that used high-pressure water, which was then filtered and recycled within the machine. By then the company had built its own facility at the Palmer Business District, a city-designated zone for manufacturing, warehouses, and distribution, with easy access to rail and road.

STG can do just about any construction job in Alaska, but the company’s niche is erecting and maintaining telecommunications towers.

Along the way, Triverus strove to find vendors—preferably Alaska vendors—to supply the parts it needed. Specialization can be lonely.

“We had a design that was progressing, but Alaska didn’t have enough vendors to do the direct-todigital design that we needed,” Vogel says. “There were welding companies, but not enough vendors that could design out of different materials. These are large, complicated pieces of equipment. There are thousands of parts—this thing is as complicated as a helicopter.”

Thus, TriJet was formed—a manufacturing company also located at the business park in Palmer, to create the parts needed for Triverus’ mobile cleaning, recovery, and recycling system. TriJet independently contracts with other companies that need direct-to-digital parts manufactured.

The funding process for Triverus’ cleaning machine had fits and starts throughout, Vogel says. The initial prototype tested well in Norfolk, Virginia, but a few more prototypes sat idle in Palmer. Then two US Navy amphibious assault ships were afflicted with particles on the flight deck that caused problems with Harrier jump jets, and an effective cleaner was needed. Two of Triverus’ machines were called in, and in less than two weeks the small carriers were certified to operate again. After a few more hiccups, Triverus jumped into full production—more than forty-three have been sold to the US Navy. Triverus sends employees out to assemble the machines and provides a week of training on maintenance and operation.

Successful Spinoff

From white paper to manufacturing took fifteen years. Vogel says he and others at Triverus learned a lot along the way. The company is still making new machines, maintaining existing machines, and expanding into other commercial cleaning and environmental cleaning markets. The COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on growth in the municipal and commercial sectors, but the company saw a rebound in 2022 and recently began shipping machines again.

“We’ve been really aggressive on the commercial side of this. We also have a surface cleaning business; we go out and do stormwater pollution prevention cleaning on the East and West Coasts,” he says. “Part of our big success was, we were able to focus on the Navy [proposal] and then transition… The Navy is not going to continue to buy these things.”

Meanwhile, TriJet has become a success in its own right. It operates separately, Vogel says, with different leadership, a different building, a different mindset. Customers other than Triverus are now its core clientele, mostly in the oil and gas, mining, and aerospace sectors.

“They give us parts they want us to make, and we make them—on time, every day. That’s what we do," Vogel says.

One of TriJet’s primary customers is The Launch Company in Anchorage, which provides ground support hardware and infrastructure for other rocket-launching companies.

“These are small components but they’re high value, and we make