Austin Construction News September 2020

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Covering the Industry’s News

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Stock exchange

Back to the Grind

Austin Wood Recycling’s Michael Martin (pictured with wife Susan) went from trading piles of stocks to trading piles of mulch.

Luke Schilhab launched his second business, Grind Time Rock Milling, last month to service the Hill Country.

hange doesn’t seem to bother Michael Martin, even when the change seems extreme. In fact, he fully embraces it, like when he traded his stock trading life for one of landscaping. “I was a stock trader in New York City, and worked on the 108th Floor of the World Trade Center,” Martin explains. “I was raised in Sarasota, FL and my wife and I moved up to New York City and worked there for five years. Then it was time to raise a family, and New York City is no place to do that, so we wanted to move back down to the South but to a larger city than Sarasota.” Martin enlisted a broker to introduce him to different businesses and decided to purchase a small company in 1987 that would become Austin Wood Recycling.

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At the time, the company was pulling in about $60,000 a year with a bright future – and then the savings and loan crisis hit. “All of the banks got consolidated,” he says. “The main customer of the company we were buying was the nation’s largest homebuilder that went bankrupt. Our biggest customer went bankrupt right when we were buying it.” Martin steered the company through the unexpected development by staying adaptable through ever-changing circumstances. “We just never said no. When someone wanted us to do anything, if we could make money at it, we just did it,” Martin says. “We first started just doing tractor mowing. Developers would put in continued on Page 14

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uke Schilhab couldn’t wait to own a construction company – literally. While his plan was to start one after college, he launched his first company as a senior majoring in Industrial Distribution with a Business minor at Texas A&M. What started out as an excavation and land clearing venture evolved into Grind Time Mulching. The fast-growing business cleared several million dollars a year, but not without a personal cost for Schilhab. “I grew it almost 500% every year for four years and I never really got to reap the financial benefit for myself because I was always dumping money back in the company to grow, grow, grow,” Schilhab remembers. “That was four years of constant headache, financial stress, and employee stress.”

Last year, Schilhab decided to sell Grind Time Mulching to a larger pipeline company in West Texas. Able to step back a bit, he focused on business development for other companies, but was soon back to the Grind – a new one this time. “Living in the Hill Country, I saw a need for rock crushing and rock milling for terrain leveling, for rock excavation, for home sites, building pads, carving out the side of a hillside to make a flat foundation versus having to build huge retaining walls with concrete or bringing in lots of fill material. A lot of material costs are eliminated by milling this material or the solid rock down to make a more workable area. Also, on open property, the Hill Country looks beautiful continued on Page 14

From skateparks to shotcrete

t may be hard to believe, but Yann Curtis’ and Jamie Curtis’ shotcrete business, Curtis Concrete Pumping (CCP Shotcrete), stemmed from their love of skateboarding, a hobby from their youth. The brothers, who with their parents once owned and operated The Skatepark of Austin, were receiving requests from Texas cities to build public skate parks. Rather than build wooden skate parks like their own, they encouraged the building of concrete skate parks like those in California and the West coast. It wasn’t long before Yann and Jamie realized that they should become designbuild concrete contractors specializing in skatepark construction for cities. In 2007, they formed SPA Skateparks and have since completed 45 public skate parks for the state. Through this work, their awareness of shotcrete’s versatility and

L-R: Brothers and CCP Shotcrete business partners Jamie Curtis and Yann Curtis

ability to accelerate project schedules grew, and a second business was born. “We know concrete and, because we build bowls and skateparks, a lot of that work is shotcrete, which is the spraying of concrete at high velocity onto walls, embankments or transitional surfaces instead of casting them,” Yann explains. The UT grads, who have lived in Austin since 1997, connected with their local friends and set out to do commercial shotcrete work under the name of Curtis Concrete Pumping (CCP Shotcrete) 11 years ago. As a shotcrete contractor, CCP specializes in large scale, time sensitive and technical shotcrete projects for civil, heavy commercial, recreational and architectural markets. Its turnkey shotcrete construction services can begin at any stage of the project. While CCP has tunnel and shoring projects under its belt, most continued on Page 14


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