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CONSTRUCTION
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The Industry’s Newspaper See Page 6
www.constructionnews.net H (210) 308-5800 H Volume 16 H Number 2 H FEBRUARY 2018
Celebrating five
Business as youth-ual
Locke Solution team members gather together at the ground breaking of their recently completed new facility.
David Esslinger and the Epoch team members.
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or as long as Asher Kazmann, president of Locke Solutions can recall, growing up he always wanted to be a precaster; that, or a professional baseball player. In January 2013, he made one of his dreams come true with a group of five employees designing and manufacturing precast concrete structures primarily for use with underground utilities such as power lines, communication lines, storm water drainage and cleaning systems. They produced their first concrete structure the 23rd of that month. “I’ve always considered my initial team of five employees to be part of our founding group. In this business, the most important piece to having success
is the integrity and quality of the people,” says Kazmann. Starting out five employees strong and by the end of the first month, they had grown to seven strong and for the first few years grew on an average of about one employee per month. Today, Locke Solutions has 44 employees throughout the company operations. The company has gone through many changes over the last five years, much of it due to the increase in volume. They’ve had equipment upgrades from adding their own onsite concrete batch plant to continually upgrading and adding to their overhead crane capacity in their manufacturing area. As they’ve incontinued on Page 13
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outh is not always wasted on the young. Only four short years after David Esslinger earned his Business Administration degree at A&M in 2002, he started his own general contracting business. “After college, I took a position in New Orleans and was offered an opportunity to come back home to Texas in Houston and I jumped at the opportunity,” Esslinger says. “In 2006, through a multitude of learning experiences, I decided to go out on my own and started Epoch Construction. It was something I had long wanted to do without any partnership or hinges to hold me back. Obviously, as everybody knows, when you’re young it’s easier to take those leaps of faith and persevere through the
struggles the first several years of doing everything as you grow.” Esslinger says he started the business as a “one-man show” out of his onebedroom apartment and grew the business steadily at about 20 percent annual growth. Twelve years later, Esslinger oversees 23 employees at Epoch’s Houston home office as well as a new Austin office, which opened early 2017. While he has no immediate plans to expand, he’s not ruling out future offices in Dallas and Corpus Christi. “Right now, we build in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin; those are our four major markets,” he says. “We do everything from high-end restaurants to private multi-story hospitals.” continued on Page 13
Concrete design
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n recent industrial construction, Third Coast General Contractors, LLC completed the project called Whiteoak Industrial Park. Project manager and superintendent Anthony Sarao and engineer Randy Rutherford with Dev-Tex Engineering, L.P, managed the project. Owner of Whiteoak Industrial Park is Steve Adkisson. The property is outside Houston city limits, located on Fairbanks N. Houston and Warren Street, north of W. Little York between Hwy 290 and Beltway 8. The industrial park provides great accessibility to freeways in Northwest Houston. Whiteoak Industrial Park has already sold and leased buildings. Houston demands for warehouses have increased with population growth. Taking a deeper look at the property, the new construction is set at 182,950-sf of dock high distribution buildings. There are eight buildings between 12,500 –
40,000-sf. It includes pre-engineered metal structures with tilt-wall façade, 33’-0 eve height with standing seam roof systems, metal building canopies with soffits and 135,00-sf of pavement. The main materials were concrete tilt wall and conventional structural steel. The total cost was $8.6 million. This projects uniqueness came from having installed a 250 horsepower electric fire pump that serves all eight buildings. The pump provides ESFR protection. Sarao says, the developer wanted to provide the ESFR sprinkler systems for all eight individual buildings to lower the cost by providing one fire pump to service all eight buildings, instead of putting a fire pump in all eight.” The time span of the project was only eight months. As Third Coast puts it, “It was a quick and easy project.” The project began in March and finished in Aerial view of Whiteoak Industrial Park.
continued on Page 13