Case Studies

Adam Hergenrother respects the privacy of his clients and doesn’t boast about the prominent people who have bought some of the high-end houses that BlackRock Construction, the company he and his brother Tom co-founded in 2012, has built in beautiful, bucolic Vermont and upstate New York. Nevertheless, word gets around, and a couple of years […]

Founded by Henok Tekeste, Claycomo, Missouri-based Blue Nile Contractors Inc. is a full-service utility contracting company serving municipal clients throughout the state. Born in Ethiopia, Tekeste says the company represents his idea of the American dream. “When I came to the United States, I never intended to work for somebody,” says Tekeste, president and founder […]

At an industry trade show this past October, the manager of a Midwest municipal utility approached the Covalen booth with some welcome news about where much of his budget for wastewater system upgrades would be going. “I am tired of not having you involved in these processes,” he told a few Covalen executives, among them […]

Every day it seems general contractors expect more, especially when it comes to the types of technology their subs must use for submittals, shop drawings, monthly billing, change order tracking, cloud-based project management and much more. While some companies may buckle under this pressure, or just outright resist, one subcontractor believes this is simply the […]

There’s more than a smattering of early 1970s idealism that’s sustained in Pennsylvania’s capital city of Harrisburg, and it’s a mindset that can cut across all political, ethnic and demographic lines. After all, most any constituency would favor an already desirable downtown becoming an even more livable and exciting place. And that has been the […]

History buffs have long been drawn to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the 1863 Civil War battle that so turned the tide in the Union’s favor and inspired Abraham Lincoln’s famous address. At, of course, a high price. The casualty count could have filled a modern baseball stadium. About 50,000 men, fairly evenly divided between those […]

As another summer heats up in the Denver metro area, dwellers can expect to endure 35 to 40 days of temperatures hitting 90 degrees or higher. It’ll be times like these when many of them will discover—the hard way, of course—that their air conditioning isn’t humming up to full capacity. Well, good luck finding an […]

Wichita, Kansas, is in the heart of Tornado Alley, the swath of south-central U.S. states especially prone to the most severe wind and hailstorms. According to the Tornado History Project, since 1950, Kansas has seen more than 4,000 tornados. Hundreds of those have passed through Wichita. Then, there’s hail. According to the National Oceanic and […]

In Texas, the landscape is dotted with hundred-year-old courthouses, longstanding federal buildings and many other tributes to the Lone Star State’s long and proud history. But that ornate trim, those façades, those decorative ceilings—they aren’t without some baggage. “You see all these one-of-a-kind, handcrafted building materials on so many old buildings that are coated with […]

At first glance, the wooden wares offered by Houston-based Building Products Plus (BPP) might not seem like the stuff of glossy magazine spreads. Yet, you’ll see them on a golf course in Da Nang, Vietnam, supporting sand-trap embankments and water-retaining walls to the tune of 2,000 linear feet. They withstand the traffic of thousands of […]