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CONSTRUCTION
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The Industry’s Newspaper www.constructionnews.net
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Volume 18
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Number 1
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JANUARY 2015
A legacy in mosaic
Digging into destiny
Erin Albrecht and her father, John Kotara, are continuing a legacy that he and his brother started three decades ago.
For the last two years, Wayne and Randall Rodgers have been building the family business up as a father and son team.
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t J&R Tile, Erin Albrecht is preparing to carry on the legacy that her father, John Kotara, and her uncle, Raymond Kotara, began 30 years ago. Though her dad will remain involved in the company and will be consulting, Albrecht will be the owner one day, keeping the family business in the family. When John got out of the service, he and his brother worked for Villa Tile. He went through the apprenticeship program that Burbank High School offered at the time and became a tile setter. In 1984, he and his brother heard the owner wanted to sell, and they leapt at the opportunity. Today, Albrecht’s mother, Christine Kotara, is controller. The chief estimator is Tammy Coiteux. Raymond passed
away about 10 years ago, and the vice president of the company, Merrill Moy, retired. Before Moy left, Albrecht apprenticed under him for six months. “My dad taught me the field and Merrill taught me everything from how to read blueprints to how to talk to general contractors and estimate,” says Albrecht, who is a project manager and estimator. “So, really it’s the best of both worlds between both of them. I’ve always loved construction and now I get to come in in a commercial aspect.” When Albrecht was growing up, she would act as her father’s helper on side jobs he did close to their home in Kosciusko, TX, a heavily Polish community where continued on Page 24
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hen Wayne Rodgers founded Wayne Rodgers Construction in Castroville in 1992, he worked out in the field and his wife, Pauline, took care of the books and the office. Through its 20th anniversary, the company was still just the two of them. Then their son, Randall Rodgers, came onboard full-time. When he was in high school, Randall, now 24, worked with his father over the summers. While studying business marketing at Texas State University in San Marcos, he worked with his dad during weekdays when he didn’t have class. After college, he was in sales at Neff Rental in Austin, but almost two years ago, he decided to get involved in his father’s company permanently - helping with the workload
and growing the family business. “We’ve been very blessed and had a lot of work in San Antonio,” says Wayne. “With Randall coming on with us, he has brought a lot of technology that he learned in college to our business and [helped] expand our business that way.” For example, the elder Rodgers cites significant reduction in the time it takes to bid jobs, doing tasks like takeoffs digitally. Today, at 54, Rodgers expects that his son and daughter, Devyn, will take over the business and keep it running. He notes that Devyn, 22, is very interested in coming into the business and just graduated from Texas A&M University where she studied agricultural economics and business. continued on Page 24
Hosts at the Pearl
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enovations of the historic Pearl Brewery have created new spaces for a vast array of businesses, and recently, Cambridge Contracting built a San Antonio home for PEER 1 Hosting in the historic garage building at the Pearl. In the old garage where the Aveda Institute was the previous tenant, Cambridge renovated 25,000sf at a contract cost of $950,000 for PEER 1, a Canadabased data hosting company. Rusty Hastings, president of Cambridge, estimates that the construction team gutted 75 percent of the existing space for the complete redesign and build for PEER 1. With the company operating out of Canada, PEER 1 hired eVOLVE, a thirdparty data center solutions consulting group in Houston, which acted as the MEP engineer and hired San Antoniobased Insite Architects for the project. Since a data hosting company would
be using the space, work was very heavy on the mechanical, electrical and plumbing sides. There were many accommodations required for the data infrastructure, such as several server rooms and many cable chases. Hastings describes the finished project as a very data conscious, tech-savvy space for a high-tech, high-end user, adding that there are lots of computer screens, televisions and interactive screens throughout the space. “For example, the conference rooms all have their own interactive screens so you can see a picture of the person that is using the conference room at the time and what they are doing,” explains Hastings. “It’s a very interactive group, because that’s what they do, and they’re high-tech. “The infrastructure of the data systems was above and beyond the normal Through renovations to the old garage building at the Pearl, Cambridge Contracting created an employee-oriented atmosphere, including this Fiesta-style café, for the team of PEER 1 Hosting.
continued on Page 24