Directional Services, Inc. by North American Constructors Journal

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Directional Services, Inc.:

Powering Up With Solar Directional Services, Inc. of Hope Mills, NC is a renowned national solar electrical subcontractor supplying turnkey services to a burgeoning industry Written by Kevin Doyle Produced by Stephen Marino

www.directionalservices.net

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www.directionalservices.net

irectional Services, Inc. of Hope Mills, NC began in 2005 as a regional provider of directional drilling services but within a decade grew into a renowned national solar electrical subcontractor supplying turnkey services to the burgeoning solar industry.

Directional Services, Inc. | 4 overhead distribution electrical systems for electric utility companies, municipalities, and rural cooperatives, performing all aspects of construction and maintenance needed to provide quality services.

“We’re still committed to succeeding and growing in drilling and utility work but solar has just taken off. In 2018 about 90 percent of our work was turnkey solar with the remaining being split pretty evenly between drilling and utility,” explains Keith Crumpler, the company’s Chief Financial Officer.

Directional Drilling: DSI provides premier directional boring installations with a proven model that starts from the beginning of every bore with supervision, bore profiling, job planning and post bore product inspection, followed up with job quality assurance. DSI’s drill operators and employees rank among the most qualified in the industry.

Recognized in 2018 by Solar Power World as the largest solar electrical subcontractor in the United States, DSI employs 200 full-time staff and works directly with over 300 trusted subcontractors who display the company brand on their protective gear, clothing and vehicles and are considered part of the family.

Solar Electrical Turnkey DC/MV: DSI provides complete electrical installation to include terminations, wire management, underground trenching, transformer and inverter installation with complete interconnect to the customer. Completed turnkey projects have ranged from 5MW to over 100MW.

The company ranked third overall on SPW’s 2019 Top Solar Contractors list and executed 646MW in 2018 with projected projects totaling 700MW for 2019. It does not work in the commercial or residential sphere.

“We focus on quality and timeliness. We don’t focus on price and we don’t try to be the cheapest out there. It all goes back to our people – when

The company’s core competencies are: Electrical/Underground Utility Construction: DSI constructs and maintains underground and

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“It all goes back to our pe customer’s expectations o clients are OK with paying a is top-n - CFO Keith

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you exceed customer’s expectations on quality and timeliness, clients are OK with paying a premium price. Our work is top-notch and, in that regard, word of mouth carries a lot of weight,” Crumpler says.

An Expansion Story Tim Sealey and Thomas Horne were the company’s two partners upon founding it as a directional drilling contractor in 2005. “Thomas and Tim developed a

eople – when you exceed on quality and timeliness, a premium price. Our work notch.” h Crumpler

relationship with Brantley Turner, who was an operations manager elsewhere and were doing some work for him. Brantley joined DSI in 2014 and he became an equal partner in January of 2015. That added utility work to our scope, mostly overhead and underground utilities maintenance. We did some construction but all on the distribution side,” Crumpler explains. The company’s metamorphosis began in earnest when Turner received a cold call from a company requiring assistance laying underground cable. “Brantley started doing that and that slowly led to that scope within the business. While we were doing utility work we were still doing drilling work and we expanded to the point they wanted us to do the entire electrical

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Directional Services, Inc. | 7 scope as well,” Crumpler says. DSI began subbing work out to Justin Keck in 2015. He held an unlimited electrical license that allowed him to work from the meter back, of enormous importance to DSI. “With solar farms, the connection is at the meter but there is a lot of work to be done that his skillset didn’t cover and Brantley’s did. They meshed perfectly. Since they were sharing a building it was more beneficial to merge the two companies as DSI with Justin’s company as a complete subcontractor. We kept building bigger projects while moving outside of our typical region,” Crumpler says. Today DSI operates in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas. “We’ve increased our geography quite a bit. We installed

646MW of turnkey solar in 2018 and it was probably half or less than that in 2017, so it’s grown pretty quickly,” says Crumpler. The company is a member of SEIA, the national trade association for the U.S. solar industry.

Key Projects The Palmetto project for Cypress Creek, a leading developer of utility scale solar, is located in Bowman, SC. A Cypress Creek press release stated the 106MW farm went online in August 2019 and will provide enough power for approximately 94,000 homes across Orangeburg County. “It was the largest in the state when it was put into operation. It had all kinds of challenges around the engineering and there was a new racking system. Our guys did a really good job and adapted to the changes, making sure it was a success for us and for

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Directional Services, Inc. | 8 the customer and that everyone was happy,” said Crumpler.

up the process of our management,” Crumpler says.

DSI is also involved in the 101MW Bowman project for Pine Gates Renewable, also located in Orangeburg County. Located on 651 acres, it is one of largest solar projects in the state and will be powered by approximately 850,000 panels. It features The BLA (Big Lead Assembly ®) system developed by Shoals Technologies Group that, according to the Shoals web site “takes all the guesswork out of wiring your solar field.”

Staying Safe

“We went out to Shoals for a factory tour. They trained us how to do it. Our guys are really excited about this system and how it’s going to speed

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DSI exceeds the highest industry standards, carrying a 0.74 EMR rating. The company’s Safety Director oversees a corps of eight safety coordinators, who fan out to job sites to ensure enforcement of site-specific protocol. Weekly Toolbox Talks examine every possible situation from recognizing the warning signs of heat exhaustion during the summer months to avoiding poisonous snakes in the field. The company has experienced only one incident of lost work days in the last three years.

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“Our customers require a certain level of safety presence on site and whatever those requirements are, our standards are typically above and beyond,” Crumpler points out. “Our safety culture is driven around our employees first. The EMR rating is a product of what we do and we’re proud of it, but we do it for our people.” Ultimately, Crumpler says no member of the management team wants “to make that phone call to a spouse to tell them something happened because we missed the ball.”

The Solar (R)evolution As CFO, Crumpler oversees everything

to do with capital planning, including but not limited to managing forecasted capital needs, capital expenditures, developing relationships with banks to ensure the availability of working capital, budgeting projects and managing materials costs. He is constantly challenged by the adjustments needed to keep pace with the speed at which the industry continues to evolve. “Solar is so new, especially the utilities field, and it’s changing all the time. You go from underground-based systems to a CAB system where the wire management system is above ground. The industry is moving really fast and we really have to plan what it’s going

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to cost for these projects,” Crumpler says. “You have to be dynamic in your budgeting process and how you’re looking at theses projects to make sure that you’re going to be able to perform profitably. Otherwise it’s all for nothing,” he adds. While the cost of panels continues to fall, benefiting end users, the materials DSI uses – particularly conduit cables and wires that are measured in miles – remain expensive. “Our labor costs certainly aren’t going down. We buy all commodity-driven materials and those are going up,” Crumpler notes.

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The company’s CapEx spend is typically 5-10% of annual revenue on items such as mini-excavators, skid steers and utility cars, all very necessary when a 100MW site typically tops out at 350 staff. The average age of the company’s equipment is three years old. “When you’re on an 800-acre tract of land you have to be able to get them around. We have a fleet of utility cars and we are buying those all the time. To keep up with the growth we have experienced, the only way to keep our guys productive is to give them the equipment they need to succeed,” Crumpler asserts. “We want them driving around in quality trucks and for

“

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“Solar is so new, especially the utilities field, and it’s changing all the time … The industry is moving really fast and we really have to plan what it’s going to cost for these projects.” - CFO Keith Crumpler

the equipment that they use to be topnotch.”

by making sure they take ownership in the planning process,” Crumpler says.

Day to Day

“We don’t want to be a company that says ‘Here are your numbers, figure it out.’ That’s not how we work and these guys don’t like to be told that. These are smart guys and they know their trade very well,” he adds.

Project budgeting is an exercise in cooperation – Crumpler provides historical data regarding typical spend on a given job and the site foremen and Project Managers build the budget. “These guys really take on ownership of the process. They know the expectations that have been set. If they are over in a certain area, they know why they planned it that way and what went wrong and we can address that

The company doesn’t utilize formal continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Kaizen but Crumpler suspects many of the concepts are ingrained into how DSI conducts business.

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Directional Services, Inc. | 12 “We just know what works for us. I bet if someone from DSI took the courses they would say we already do a lot of that,” he says. For example, the company tracks everything by cost codes and conducts post-project debriefings. “What did we win at? What did we lose at? How did we do compared to what we planned for and what did we miss? We want to know,” Crumpler explains. “Maybe we weren’t that great at wire management. What did we do different? Basically we want to know what did we do right and what should we keep doing in the future?” The company works with two subcontractors whose workforces are essentially de facto DSI employees

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“They are supervised by DSI and have very little work outside of what DSI does. They come to all of our safety meetings, they wear DSI vests when they’re out there and we’re really integrating them into our culture, a core group of guys that understand what we expect because we want to help them to grow and we want to help them to win. We can’t ask for better partners on the labor side,” Crumpler says. The company has been using the same materials vendors since its inception and, Crumpler says, “the reliability of our materials partners is huge. They haven’t let us down yet and if there is going to be a delay, they let us know.” Committed to community betterment,

Directional Services, Inc. | 13 the solar wave, an industry with a growth curve that can be measured in decades. DSI has established an enviable workplace culture of shared success and the company offers profit sharing and 401k matches. Securing, training and maintaining a highly skilled staff does not project as a problem.

DSI sponsors local sports teams and its annual golf tournament benefits the Communities In Schools of Cumberland County, NC with a population of approximately 320,000. The first two tournaments raised approximately $100,000, including $60,000 in 2019. “We’re involved with Communities In Schools because it puts additional support people into guidance and provides additional behavioral counseling and tutoring. We’ve partnered with that organization because we want to put our energy into education for the kids in our region,” Crumpler says.

Looking Ahead The company has positioned itself as a premier firm riding the crest of

“Being a part of this company and helping to make sure it’s successful and being part of a new industry are exciting. We’ve built the largest solar plant in the state (North Carolina) two times and now we’re doing the same thing in South Carolina,” Crumpler concludes.