Specializing in structural steel, metal building systems, insulated metal panels and solid wood, Sure Steel Inc. performs approximately 75% of its work working with conventional steel and metal systems, while the remaining 25% focuses on solid wood and insulated metal panels.
By 2023, the company has completed more than $100 million in massive hybrid wood and structural steel construction and is looking to do more in the Mid-Atlantic region. Some may be surprised to find a steel assembler working with sustainable materials, but the company’s business model is also non-traditional. While manufacturers typically have the primary contract with the general contractor and hire an on-site erection company for installation, the Salt Lake City-based company contracts directly with the general contractor, overseeing the entire process and performing the labor on site. Sure Steel works with the general contractor to develop an efficient assembly plan and manages the supply chain.
In this year’s ENR MidAtlantic Specialty Contractor survey, the company, founded in 1993, ranks TK with $24.66 million in revenue. The company was ranked #21 last year with $31.20 billion in regional revenue and will only earn $5.08 billion in regional revenue in 2022, when the company ranked #17. Sure Steel also ranked No. 108 on ENR’s 2024 National Top 600 Specialty Contractors list, with 2023 revenue of $383.7 million.
ENR MidAtlantic 2024 Specialty Contractor of the Year CEO Daniel B. Miller discussed Sure Steel’s success in the MidAtlantic with ENR Regional Editor Justin Rice. This Q&A has been edited and condensed.
Q&A
How and why did you start working in the Mid-Atlantic region?
“The business model is logical. If you’re a contractor, you want to buy from a subcontractor.”
—Daniel B. Miller, CEO, Sure Steel Inc
In 2016 one of our clients came to us and said, “Would you be interested in doing something? [mission critical] work in southern virginia? We were successful in winning the opportunity. It was supposed to be just one job, but that job turned into many… We started hiring out east to do the work. We started to have a lot of local employees and one of our executives said, “I know we’re not permanent here, but we’ve been here for two years.” Let’s make this work.
All of this work is based in the Charlotte office. Are you planning to open an office in the Mid-Atlantic?
We will continue to grow in each region where we are present, and if a certain area becomes more dominant than another, we will look very closely at whether or not we should have an office presence there.
Some companies say it’s hard to get work without a local office. This is not your case. Why?
Our client base and ability to travel as a company. We’re able to succeed in the work we do largely because of our high regard for safety and quality, and we’re production-oriented, so you’ve got the trifecta there. You can see this in our EMR (Experience Modification Rate). We’re at 0.38, which is the best in the industry for an EMR. This year we will spend just over one and a half million hours. We have a high intensity focus on security. We support it in quality. We are an AISC (American Institute of Steel Construction) certified director with endorsements on things like roofing and our quality standards. Whether or not we are doing massive wood, structural steel or metal construction, we make sure our quality standards follow the processes outlined by AISC. … And then, of course, production, we take on a lot of very large projects, and it’s important that those projects are completed sooner or later, and so we focus very carefully on our production rates. We measure them daily, making sure we set and achieve our goals. And if there is something that disrupts that, we have a plan in place where we can listen so we can adapt and get the overall schedule.
Why does your business model to contract directly with GC work well?
The business model is very logical. If you are a contractor, you want to buy from a subcontractor. And in the structural steel world for whatever reason, I don’t understand the history of why that is, but a lot of the companies that do is fabricate… so there’s this intermediary supplier, between the subcontractor and the contractor, and this just logically, doesn’t work. And yet, for whatever reason, the industry has sustained it. Steel sure works differently. We say, ‘No, no, no; suppliers must supply.’ That’s what they’re good at. This is what they do themselves and we want to buy what people are good at. We want our customers to buy what we are good at, which is that we are a subcontractor, a specialty contractor who does the construction of their projects in house. And we don’t want a middleman between us, or the customer, and I think the alignment there, it’s a lot like an electrical or mechanical trade. You are shopping at the store. You are not buying from the supplier.
We have the personnel direction to be able to go and buy that material from those vendors that are working on their own, and whether they’re fabricators or suppliers of miscellaneous metals, that’s what we want to buy and that’s what they ultimately want. to sell They just want to be part of the project. And that leap that has happened or is happening in the industry, it may work for their business models, but for us, we need that person-to-person relationship between the contractor’s superintendent and our superintendent to be able to make smooth decisions. by a third party
Sure Steel’s recent projects at a glance:
Southwest Airlines Maintenance Hangar, Baltimore
The approximately 129,000 square meter hangar houses three commercial aircraft inside the hangar and eight outside the facility. Sure Steel’s self-executing contract included the installation of structural steel, secondary light gauge steel, insulated metal wall panels and a single skin vertical seam roof.
Form Energy Battery Plant in Weirton, W.Va.
Sure Steel installed structural steel, secondary steel, mezzanine structure with metal decking, insulated metal wall panels and vertical seam roof with batt insulation.
Confidential data center
Sure Steel was the turnkey supplier of structural steel, miscellaneous steel, cross-laminated timber planks and associated components on a project of approximately 380,000 square feet, including separate “hybrid” buildings with structural steel frame superstructures and solid wood southern pine subfloor with concrete cover. flagstones The exteriors have insulating metal panels and glass.
I guess being able to manage the supply chain yourself became very beneficial when COVID-19 broke out?
Absolutely, you are right. Instead of having the supplier make decisions on our behalf and then enforce them in a contract, we are making decisions on our own behalf, and the suppliers support that. For us to get through that, specifically going through COVID, and the huge boom that’s taken place in the construction industry since then, we absolutely needed that control.
Do you draw a direct line between this business model and your success?
yes We made the decision to do this in 2017 as a company. Before 2017, we didn’t really pay attention to how a customer bought it. We were like everyone else. It’s about “Yes, we want to be able to get the job done.” But we looked at the kind of work we were doing in each contract structure and said, “Where do we get the best communication with the customer? And where does the customer get the best communication with us?’ Because communication, to a large extent, dictates the outcome. It’s when people don’t communicate with each other that things tend to go wrong in a project. But if we have that direct line of communication, how does one contract when a contractor contracts directly with a subcontractor without a third party supplier, between us we can make decisions together to benefit the outcome of the project and the client.
A growing part of your business is the installation of hybrid steel frame-mass timber systems. Why does this make sense?
It makes sense to hire us as a structural company to do this because it is structurally integrated into the projects. We are using solid wood shear walls. We are using it for flooring. In many cases, they can be used for your verticals, your columns or your horizontals, your main beams or even intermediate supports. What might be steel in a project with one design firm, in another firm might be more hybrid and one element is solid wood, as opposed to a structural steel element.
Why is it so important for the company to incorporate solid wood into your business?
For us, it’s about the customer. If the client comes to us and says, “Hey, here’s what we’ve designed, we want to be able to build it so they don’t have to go hire multiple trades to be able to get it, it’s not very expensive.” efficient for them, and for the contractors, it will be a nightmare to coordinate those trades that are so dependent on each other during the construction process. But for us, we do everything under one umbrella. We are raising the structural column, and then we are raising the intermediate glue lamp, and then in the same rise the CLT floor is installed.
Is it also important from the aspect of environmental impact?
certainly There’s a big push from our customers, specifically with what we have on board, to be able to make sure that their facilities, their buildings, that they’re producing as they build their infrastructure, reduce their carbon footprint in the US and around the world
What is the most rewarding part of the industry?
That we manage to build things. We’re on it [Zoom] meeting right now Data is stored in data centers built by Sure Steel. You took a flight to go there [ENR MidAtlantic Best Projects] award ceremony [in Baltimore]. Depending on the airline, you probably came from an airline and we built their maintenance hangers that they use to fix the planes so they are operational.
How will the second Trump administration affect the steel industry?
In construction, the reality is that it depends on whether the people who need new facilities are investing in it now or later. And we hope that they will continue to invest so that we can continue to build.
what happens next
It really is a great group of people here at Sure Steel. We plan to continue investing in our people. Training is a big thing for us. I want everyone to be an expert in the industry, and there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to put in the hours and learn, and we can give them opportunities.
