Editor’s Note: Mitch Cox was a finalist for 2012 Contractor of the Year. He started Mitch Cox Construction Inc. in 1980 in Johnson City, Tennessee. The company has 35 employees with annual volume of $8 million to $10 million. The company serves the MOB, renovation, office and retail construction markets.
Mitch Cox, CEO and founder of the company that bears his name, started his career developing commercial real estate, subcontracting the shells of buildings on his sites and using his own people to finish the interiors. As his hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee, continued to grow and prosper so did Mitch’s real estate business and construction division.
“We started with one guy, then two, three, four and just kept hiring,” Cox says.
Some 75 to 80 percent of the work performed by his construction division was for his own properties, including shopping centers, warehouses and flex space projects. “We probably built 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of office space every year,” Cox says. “We never ran out of work because if we finished with something we had in place, we’d just go build a spec office building.
The business model of a developer with a construction capability, works well in a small market like Johnson City. “We can create more work than the typical contractor,” Cox says. “We try to do as much design-build as we can. We’ve had an architect on staff for the last 10 or 11 years. Being multi-disciplined, having that architect on staff, and being able to do design-build has helped us in this down economy. It allows us to be a little choosier in doing what we know and what we’re good at.”
In 1997 Cox developed a 75-acre property for residential housing and mixed use. “For 20 years we avoided residential work. I used to pride myself on that,” Cox says. “I found out that building residential is a totally different business. You use a different set of subs because commercial subs just can’t compete with the smaller residential subs,” Cox says. “So getting started was like starting a new business where you have to build relationships. It took a couple of years before we could be competitive.”
