Terracon will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2025. It has grown from a single office in Iowa to 175 locations nationwide and now has more than 6,000 employees. By the end of 2022, the Olathe, Kan.-based company became a billion-dollar company, bolstered in part by strong performance from its Midwest offices. Regional revenue peaked at $245 million in 2023, up nearly 12% from 2022, contributing to the company’s global revenue of $1.16 billion.
Of the 65,000 projects Terracon completed nationwide by 2023, 13,800 were in the Midwest.
With such an expansive project portfolio, comprehensive regional impact and a commitment to the growth of its employee owners, Terracon has been named ENR Midwest’s 2024 Design Firm of the Year.
Driving success
While most of Terracon’s growth was organic, a small percentage came from a series of recent acquisitions. Since 2017, the company has completed 20 deals nationwide, with three recent additions in the Midwest: St. John-Mittelhauser & Associates Inc. in 2018, Wang Engineering Inc. in 2022 and Pivvot in 2021.
A robust strategic planning process engages leaders of operations, business lines and service lines across the company to help determine where opportunities lie, explains Jason Sander, Terracon’s senior vice president and national director of materials services. The firm also aims to determine “in which markets are we in which we could be more? In which markets are we looking that maybe it doesn’t make sense and we need to focus those efforts elsewhere. So basically it’s all about finding the focus.”
Another driver of this success is employee ownership, which has helped foster a sense of pride and commitment throughout the company, “because if Terracon does well, all of our employees do well, not just a small handful,” Sander says.
The commitment to fostering the potential of each employee is another contributor. “Our strategic vision is to have the best people,” says Linda Yang, senior director, vice president and regional manager of Terracon. “When employees are happy, customers are happy.”
“Our strategic vision is to have the best people. When employees are happy, customers are happy.”
—Linda Yang, Terracon Senior Director, Vice President and Regional Manager
To that end, the company has placed a renewed focus on employee engagement and development. In the past year alone, it has grown from three employee resource groups to six, which is helping to bridge geographic distances and better connect employees.
Synergies transcend employee relationships and impact Terracon’s capabilities as well. With so many offices and resources, “we can provide faster access to project locations, helping clients implement their work in a shorter period of time and at a lower cost,” says Yang. “This is one way to help customers stay competitive.”
A wide range of service offerings covering the entire project lifecycle, from geotechnical to environmental, materials and facilities, provides clients with a one-stop shop.
“Our success is really based on so many things coming together: our safety culture, our strategic vision, our values and our service offerings across all major business sectors and our project delivery,” he says Yang. “So all these things and [also that] We offer a high quality service to our customers.”
Having a strong growth organization and combining that with innovation and technology also helps differentiate Terracon, “which is helping our customers see additional value in what we do,” adds Sander.
Terracon’s Wang engineering team navigated the underground utility challenges of Chicago’s Jane Byrne Interchange project.
Photo courtesy of Terracon
Specialized experience
To meet the increasing challenge of aggressive project schedules, Terracon teams are using innovative site characterization techniques. From cone penetration testing (CPT) to ground-penetrating radar testing and solar charge testing, Terracon has greatly expanded its geophysical service offering, Sander says.
The company also owns a large subsurface data set that has been gathered over the past 60 years, Yang adds.
It’s specialized knowledge like this that keeps customers coming back. For nearly 30 years, MC Group LLC has turned to Terracon as the go-to resource for complex soil problems.
“We are a demanding client who needs well-researched technical data and resulting recommendations quickly so that we can leverage that information to make timely decisions … for our hyper-tracked schedules,” says Ric Miller, founding partner of MC Group LLC. “We have worked with Terracon’s experts for the vast majority of these projects because of their extensive knowledge of complex soil conditions and, more importantly, the practical cost-saving ideas and solutions they bring” .
“So far, 2024 is a bit of a repeat of last year, which is good. Like winning back-to-back Super Bowls.”
—Jason Sander, senior director, senior vice president, national director of materials services, Terracon
An ongoing project is the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center, where Terracon experts evaluated foundation system options for several cancer treatment linear accelerator vaults (notoriously heavy structures due to their protection requirements against radiation) and provided cost-effective solutions for managing below-grade occupied areas that are within the water table of the Advanced Care Center facility, Miller explains.
“Speed to market is important for our large projects – the reduced time between innovation and revenue-generating employment is an important factor in meeting or exceeding established project expectations,” says Miller. “Having a front-end resource that understands and embraces our overall goals is a differentiator that Terracon brings. That’s why Terracon is our go-to resource for complex projects.”
The firm’s consulting engineers are also some of the best people Abel Construction Co. has ever worked with, adds Jeff Doss, director of business development and marketing. Abel and Terracon’s partnership goes back nearly a decade on projects such as an Advance Ready Mix concrete plant in Elizabethtown, Ky., and the upcoming BOSK electric vehicle plant for Ford Motor Co.
“There are engineering and consulting firms and then there’s Terracon,” says Doss. “Our teams are impressed with how everyone breaks down very complicated data to make sense. This is not very easy to do with the services offered by Terracon.”
The $284 million Chester Bridge design project, which spans the Mississippi River, will reduce flood-related closures.
Photo courtesy of Terracon
Projects in Abundance
While all Terracon service lines are growing, some are doing better than others. Over the past year, the biggest growth has been in solar and renewable energy, digital infrastructure in the form of technology and data centers, and transportation and other infrastructure.
“We’re starting to see a lot of the IIJA money and projects that started in design now start to get built,” says Sander.
Throughout 2023, Terracon teams were part of more than 6,100 road, highway, bridge and tunnel projects, one of the largest being the Chester Bridge Replacement Project. At $284 million, the design-build effort connects Perryville, Missouri, and Chester, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. Terracon provides QA/QC in partnership with Ames Construction.
As part of the construction engineering inspection and testing services on the Chester Bridge, the Terracon team established a field laboratory to perform material testing in accordance with AASHTO standards while performing dynamic testing and analysis of high voltage for piles of pipes.
“Projects like this require very specialized expertise, very specialized certification requirements,” adds Sander. “But the project is on track and things are going well.”
Other Midwest project starts in 2023 include a $100 million foundry for AY McDonald Manufacturing Co. in Dickeyville, Wisconsin, American Royal’s $350 million facility in Kansas City, Missouri, and a $732 million Dam and Dam 25 improvement project in Winfield. , Mo.
Recently completed work includes the $75 million, three-story, 61,000-square-foot, 650,000-gallon Sobela Ocean Aquarium at the Kansas City Zoo, for which Terracon provided material testing and special inspections. And in early 2023, one of the company’s recent acquisitions, Wang Engineering, completed work on the Jane Byrne Interchange in Chicago.
Formerly called the Circle Interchange, this intersection of four major highways near downtown Chicago sees more than 400,000 vehicles daily. The scope of work included 20 bridges, an overpass, 51 retaining walls and the realignment or reconstruction of pavement utilities.
“It had a budget of $640 million over 10 years and is one of the largest projects in the state’s history,” Yang says. “This new exchange removed a notorious bottleneck.”
As the project’s geotechnical consultant and engineers, the Wang Engineering team faced challenges that included historic and commuter rail tunnels and a 40-foot-thick layer of native clay to help rebuild the interchange. The team advanced just 350 boreholes, adds Corina Farez, Wang’s senior geotechnical consultant.
In Covington, Kentucky, construction on the new Brent Spence Bridge that will carry Interstates 71 and 75 over the Ohio River between Covington and Cincinnati will begin in 2025.
“The original bridge is structurally sound, but functionally it is obsolete. So the IIJA was really the catalyst that provided the necessary funding to start construction on this project and do the full design,” says Sander.
The new two-story bridge will carry northbound and southbound interstate traffic, but the existing bridge will remain in place to carry local traffic across the river. Terracon will help provide construction administration and oversight for the Ohio Department of Transportation for the next six to seven years.
keep growing
Terracon’s strategic planning leadership team is now working on a revised strategic plan, which will be presented to the company’s directors next May. “So far, 2024 is a bit of a repeat of last year, which is good. Like winning back-to-back Super Bowls,” Sander says.
Yang says the many opportunities in the public sector have helped outpace the somewhat less active private sector over the past year. But with interest rates expected to ease as the year progresses, private sector work appears poised to rebound.
“Increased awareness of sustainability, climate change and resilience are certainly driving more opportunities in the Midwest,” says Yang. “This is an election year and things can be a little tricky, but overall, we’re very confident about 2024 and beyond.”
