Case Studies

Most six-year-olds spend their days playing with toys or watching Paw Patrol, Odd Squad or SpongeBob SquarePants. It was different for Bruce Meyer. As a young child growing up in rural Illinois, Meyer would sit at a small table with paper, a pencil and a ruler, drawing his family’s house. He’d re-imagine the floorplan so […]

Growing up in Burlington, Massachusetts, Bob Engel Jr. remembers writing in his yearbook that his career goal was to be self-employed, just like his father, Bob Sr. was. There was no other man in the world he respected more. It’s been 41 years since Engel committed to following in his father’s footsteps at the family-owned […]

Be careful when you start working on what seems to be a small, seemingly straightforward construction project, says Jonathan Hunley. Likening that situation to finding a stray thread on a sweater, he says if you pull on, it everything can unravel. But even if that happens—as it did with his first project at Bon Secours […]

He’s doing all he can to sustain a sense of normality for academic and social life at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. Safety is Bruce Boyer’s priority as he tells Blueprint during an autumn interview when the small, Catholic liberal arts campus is quieter than usual. Residence hall occupancy is at 1,500, down from its usual […]

If you’ve recently stepped into a chain hotel and marveled at the contemporary look and feel—crisp architectural lines and muted colors, registration areas of faux brick and glass, comfy and spacious common areas with fireplaces and modernistic lighting, grotto-like pools and outdoor patios with firepits—chances are it was designed and built by Alpha Construction and its proven team […]

It’s a standing joke that marks the end of an academic year at Milford School District SAU-40 in bucolic southern New Hampshire. An ordinary academic year, that is. “Don’t worry,” Bill Cooper is typically told after the students are dismissed in mid-June. “It’ll be a light summer. Just the usual projects on your to-do list.” […]

During recent bouts of looting and civil unrest in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis—in response to police killings of unarmed Black men and women—several Citi Trends stores were destroyed. But, like Billy Graves has always done in his nearly four-decade career with the company, he got the damaged retail spaces repaired and reopened in a […]

When a real estate market turns sour—whether caused by market conditions or a pandemic—that’s not the time to panic, says President Blake Roberts of Legend Homes in Houston. In fact, it’s what he’d call a business opportunity. It was in this very situation that the Texas-based residential development company found itself, not once, but twice. […]

It’s a part of the world that could use a doctor or two—an area complicated by a growing need for hospital space, housing for faculty and residents and, of course, funding. The good news: the Cape Fear Valley Health System in North Carolina is primed for expansion. Sometime this year, the organization hopes to start […]

Sometimes inspiration just walks through the door. For Ben Gates, then a branch president at a bank in Fort Collins, Colorado, his first visit from NG Cos. founder and CEO Camron Lente introduced him to someone with vision and drive he found extraordinary. Though Lente and NG were struggling through hard times, Gates says he […]