But from what I’ve seen with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears in the last three weeks, it’s not time to break out the champagne just yet.
My first fact finding expedition this year was Equipment World’s annual Contractor of the Year roundtables and awards banquet in Las Vegas, March 7-10. There we wined and dined and picked the brains of 12 of the best construction contractors we found over the last year. These guys are all still in business and successful. But none of them were going as strong in 2010 and 2011 as they were before the recession hit in 2008-2009. And remember, these guys are well-established contractors—and smart.
One, Mike Thibault, owner of T-Bone Construction, Colorado Springs, thought he’d come close to losing his business in 2011-2012. Another Stuart Caudill, R.L. Caudill Construction, Owingsville, Kentucky, managed the downturn carefully through attrition and the business skills he picked up with a four year construction management degree. But as he told me, he also acquired some well priced used equipment from contractors going out of business during the downturn and got a great deal on a foreclosed building to house his business.
Earlier this week I attended the Association of Equipment Management Professionals annual conference. These are the fleet managers of construction companies with big equipment fleets (aggregate fleet value of the entire membership is in the neighborhood of $34 billion, average fleet value: $157 million.)
The meeting was robust and well attended, but there were at least two fleet managers I heard about who were currently unemployed. And these guys were hardly second stringers. They were fleet managers with decades of experience and a deep, numbers driven understanding of how to make the most of yellow iron. Yet, due to a wave of mergers and acquisitions and overly aggressive bean counting, here they were out of a job.
Then I come home to find one of the top construction firms in our county, Racon, getting out of the business and putting it’s $26 million fleet up for sale.
