Contractors weather Recession by specializing, or in some cases, branching out

Published 4:00 pm Monday, January 24, 2011

Even those with no direct stake in construction have read the post-building-bubble headlines and know the Recession dealt the industry a significant hit.

However, while national and regional construction statistics have been bleak, not all local contractors are suffering.

For Shane Dean Construction, the trick to withstanding the Recession has been to avoid spending money unnecessarily while diversifying the company’s products and services.

“We’ve found other avenues,” said Dean, whose Seaside business is in its 11^th year. The company started with custom homes and remodels and eventually grew to include commercial construction. “We’ve gotten into weatherization work. We did our first weatherization job in June, and started our training in May.”

Dean and his seven employees worked with the non-profit Community Action team in St. Helens to obtain home weatherization training. The agency serves clients in Columbia, Clatsop and Tillamook counties. Its grant-based Weatherization Contractor Training Program pays local contractors to improve the energy efficiency of clients’ homes. “A lot of them aren’t air-tight,” said Dean.

The program has provided Shane Dean Construction with steady work in recent months, said Dean.

Another way in which Shane Dean Construction has diversified is by focusing on building Aging in Place homes.

Aging in Place is a movement that supports the notion that most senior citizens should be allowed to live out their lives in their own homes rather than being forced to live in assisted living or care facilities. That movement has grown to include home construction and remodel work.

“We sent (employee) Leslie Shepherd to school to be certified as an Aging in Place specialist. It teaches you to look at, when you’re building new homes, how people are going to be in their homes longer.”

In Aging in Place homes, doorways are built wider than normal to allow for eventual access by those who use wheelchairs or walkers, he said.

“You plan for eventually installing grab-bars. It’s a nice, custom-looking home that doesn’t look like a care facility. Since the bubble burst, people are looking at staying in their homes longer.”

Dean and his wife, Jana, who co-owns the construction company, have also emphasized marketing their company during the Recession. “We used to get calls (for our services) a couple of times a week,” he said. “Builders were spoiled for awhile – there was more building than there were builders. It was a good industry to be in. But now there are a lot of good builders here – how do you stand out more than the rest of them? Before the Recession, I don’t think we marketed at all.”

Beyond traditional advertising, Shane Dean Construction has kept its name in the public eye through a variety of civic activities, including building sheds for a local community garden project, building and exhibiting floats in local parades and donating custom-built children’s playhouses to be auctioned for several local charitable organizations.

The company has also become savvier with social networking and other Internet tools.

“We YouTube our projects,” said Dean. “We have customers who live in Washington. For them to see YouTube videos of the progress of their projects, it’s priceless.

“We also changed the way we interact with our customers. Instead of faxing, we use Google Docs for our projects. I had never even touched a computer about a year-and-a-half ago. But we changed our game plan. ‘What can we offer that the average builder wouldn’t offer?'”

Dean reiterated his belief that avoiding unneeded spending prior to the bubble bursting put his company on stable ground.

“We’ve been pretty fortunate, but it goes back to decision-making. We made some good decisions before the Recession. We didn’t finance anything. A truck payment is $700 a month. Just having our office at home is one of those little things that helps. Our number one strategy was to make do with what we had.”

Jared Rickenbach, president of Astoria’s Rickenbach Construction, holds a similar conviction.

“I think the biggest thing that we’ve done to cope with the Recession is make sure we’ve operated with as lean a budget as possible,” said Rickenbach, who owns and operates Rickenbach Construction with his sister Michelle Dieffenbach and their parents.

Their parents John and Diane Rickenbach founded Rickenbach Construction in the 1960s in Astoria.

Over the years, the company has taken on residential and commercial projects, most notably restoration of Astoria’s Liberty Theatre, over which Jared served as project manager.

Jared earned his degree in construction engineering management from Oregon State University in 1999.

Dieffenbach is a licensed architect. She designed the upstairs addition to Astoria’s Banker’s Suite, among other local projects.

“We started the Recession debt-free,” said Rickenbach. “A lot of contractors, when things were going well, they spent a lot of money instead of saving it for a rainy day. But during the building boom, we lived within our means. Yeah, we probably could have mortgaged stuff and bought new equipment, but when you do that and your income goes down, what do you do? Instead of having to cut our costs and do a lesser quality, we’ve been able to cut our costs and maintain our quality.”

While Shane Dean Construction began diversifying during the Recession, Rickenbach began concentrating. “We’ve started specializing in some hospital work,” said Rickenbach. “We’ve taken on some work with Columbia Memorial (Hospital, in Astoria), and that’s helped us roll through the Recession pretty well.”

Last March, CMH awarded Rickenbach the contract to provide a total of $4.6 million in construction services on three projects at the Astoria campus. The projects include an upgrade to the hospital’s nearly 15,000-square-foot surgery suites, a new outpatient endoscopy center and a three-story, 13,500-square-foot professional office building.

“We hope to continue to work with Columbia Memorial,” said Rickenbach.