A dominant performance in the design-build distribution center market as well as a leading role in the construction industry’s battle against COVID-19 have earned Chicago-based Clayco Inc. ENR Midwest Contractor of the Year honors by a vote of ENR’s editors.

This is the second time Clayco has received the award. It won in 2011 as it was just moving to Chicago, but now it’s one of the nation’s largest privately owned real estate, architecture, engineering, design-build and construction companies, with more than 2,600 employees and $3.8 billion in 2020 revenue from the Midwest region. That revenue level is up 17% from $3.25 billion in 2019.

“Our true nature of being able to come together as a company comes down to the culture we created,” says Bob Clark, Clayco’s executive chairman and founder, who started the business in his hometown of St. Louis in 1984. “I couldn’t be more proud of how everyone— to a person—took on the role needed.”

While many businesses struggled with the pandemic, Clark points to how Clayco took a proactive approach in the fight against COVID-19. “We were making a lot of big decisions in short time frames,” Clark says about the last year. “[The attitude was] ‘pounce, instead of think,’ and we did a lot of pouncing.”

In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, Clayco worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop guidelines to keep the construction industry working. The guidelines included temperature checks, social distancing, masks and having an onsite nurse. Clark and other Clayco executives say that taking on that role was a source of pride for the company, as well as the fact that most states took the advice of the guidelines.

“As vaccines became more available, we wanted them widely distributed to our employees,” he says. “We were one of the first non-health companies to strongly encourage our employees get the vaccine.”

过去三年为黏土带来了巨大的增长，而2020年的事件并不妨碍这种增长。在过去的12个月中，该公司雇用了300多人，其中大多数在芝加哥和圣路易斯的新工作。One major change that occurred during that time was each of Clayco’s subsidiaries—CRG Realty, the Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC), Ventana Design-Build and Concrete Strategies—experienced so much growth that a new entity needed to be created to manage all of them. Thus, Clayco Enterprise was born in 2019.

作为Clayco Enterprise重组的一部分，Clark于2019年底获得了执行董事长冠军，而Russ Burns成为首席执行官兼总裁。史蒂夫·西克豪斯（Steve Sieckhaus）成为克莱科企业（Clayco Enterprise）的首席运营官，吉姆·哈维尔（Jim Havel）成为首席财务官，安东尼·约翰逊（Anthony Johnson）成为销售和营销执行副总裁，同时继续担任克莱科工业业务部门的负责人。

伯恩斯说：“最大的想法是，不仅要提供领导的过渡，而且要建立更深层次的领导力，肯定会持续到未来。”

When Clayco acquired LJC in November 2018, president and CEO Lamar Johnson told ENR Midwest one of the reasons the two companies joined forces was the inefficiencies he saw in the design-bid-build process.

“It absolutely played out as we thought,” he says of the relationship with Clayco. “There’s much more integration now, and the pandemic sped it up. One of the truths we discovered is Clayco and LJC are one of the only firms with an embedded full-scale architectural practice. We’re the only firm with institutional memory across many projects with the same teams. You can’t fast-track an oak tree; we learn from each other.”

Pfizer’s R&D facility in Chesterfield, Mo., uses the continuous lab concept, where lab areas run parallel to a continuous office zone, separated by a corridor serving both. The Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine relies on a specific type of DNA created at the facility.
Photo courtesy of Clayco Inc.

工业DNA

Clayco’s Midwest reach spreads across various sectors. Clayco recently completed renovation and design-build work on U.S. Postal Service processing plants in Chicago, Palatine, Ill., and Troy, Mich. The company handled major renovation work on Busch Stadium in St. Louis—including 46,000 seats, 3,706 club seats and 40,000 sq ft of office space for team management—as well as on the 107,650-sq-ft Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We have a saying around here [that] everybody’s got a day job,” says Sieckhaus. “You know you’ve got to keep your day job because you have to earn people’s respect and people respect people that can do. We all come to a day job to make sure that we don’t forget how our business is run and to be an integral part of making those things happen.”

Clayco’s bread and butter remains the design-build distribution center market, placing the firm at the top of ENR’s Midwest’s breakout ranking of distribution and warehouse contractors with $1.4 billion in 2020 revenue.

克拉克说：“多年来，我们一直是分销中心的参与者，但电子商务改变了游戏。”“早在2016年，每个人都问‘仓库的繁荣将持续多久？我们是在第一局还是第八局？’我想，“我们没有任何局。”

Clayco’s current projects include an 865,000-sq-ft Dollar General distribution center in Blair, Neb., a 930,000-sq-ft Nicklies-Louisville Airpark distribution center in Louisville, Ky., and a 1.6-million-sq-ft distribution warehouse in Elwood, Ill.

Anthony Johnson says today’s clients need to have their facilities to market faster than ever before and Clayco’s design-build approach can deliver the speed they require.

他说：“速度已成为游戏的重要组成部分，并且在分销中确实如此，这与制造业，食品和饮料都是如此。”对于所有这些业务而言，上市速度是非常重要的标准。只要看看现在的情况，供应链适应大流行所需的速度即可。那就是更快地进入市场。”

calisthe Clayco员工执行社会遥远nics at the jobsite of Centene's East Coast headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
Photo courtesy of Clayco Inc.

满足“积极期望”

Amazon.com选择Clayco工作在11个不同facilities across Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, Indiana and Wisconsin. One client that Anthony Johnson mentioned as an example of the needs of today’s quickly scaling construction consumer was Mark Anthony Brewing, the fourth-largest brewer in the U.S. Mark Anthony needed a new 1.2-million-sq-ft brewery in Columbia, S.C., an investment of $400 million that began construction in November 2020 and is now close to finishing on schedule by September. The brewer is now searching for 300 workers to staff the new brewery as the project nears the finish line just eight months after construction began.

“这是美国最大的啤酒厂建造25years, and it’s complex,” says John Sacksteder, president of Mark Anthony Brewing Inc., who praised Clayco for meeting the plumbing, electrical and distribution logistics needs of the facility to keep the project on track. “We’re going to be operational in September, and there are other companies that this would take—not even for the complexity of a building we’re putting up—it would take twice that time at least to do it. We set aggressive expectations, but [Clayco has] stepped up and they’ve really done a great job.”

LJC designed the new Mark Anthony Brewery in Columbia and Anthony Johnson’s industrial unit worked hand in hand with the design team to create the fast turnaround.

“马克·安东尼·布鲁（Mark Anthony Brewing）是一个完美的例子，说明在内部拥有该知识基础的地方使我们能够迅速做出反应，并在短期内提供所需的可交付成果，以交付该项目，”安东尼·约翰逊（Anthony Johnson）说。“能够沿着大厅走，与我们的工程团队，我们的混凝土小组坐下客户当场。”

Both Clark and Lamar Johnson noted their teamwork on completing Pfizer’s research and development facility in Chesterfield, Mo., as a high point of last year. Clayco submitted their initial development proposal for the research building in June 2016, and Pfizer ultimately chose them to design, build, finance and lease their 295,000-sq-ft research and development facility where a specific type of DNA for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was developed and is still created there today.

The building design is based on the continuous lab concept, where the linear lab zone runs parallel to a continuous office zone, separated by a corridor serving both lab and office, a process meant to allow the labs to change size over time.

拉马尔·约翰逊（Lamar Johnson）说：“辉瑞是我们的真正合作，对我们来说是一个大项目。”“更重要的是，由于他们在疫苗上的工作，这对行业和国家来说是一个大项目。这对我们来说是一个巨大的荣誉。”

克拉克（Clark）在今年早些时候反对职业安全和健康管理局的指导方面发表了说法，不要害羞地说出自己的想法，并倡导整个建筑行业，最初告诉雇主，他们必须记录所有对Covid-19疫苗的不良反应作为工作场所事件。该规则可能会扼杀建筑工人的疫苗接种，因为其对承包商雇主的责任要求。

After Clark said OSHA should change the rule on the ENR Critical Path podcast, OSHA revised its guidance and said employers should not record adverse reactions in their safety logs until at least May 2022.