The general contractor Swinerton has rolled out a new brand identity that reflects the businesses it has added or evolved into over the past several years.
The San Francisco-based company, which is celebrating its 130th anniversary this year, is probably best known as Swinerton Builders, a brand it started using in 2001. But over the past six or seven years, the company has diversified in different directions.
In 2008, it launched Swinerton Renewable Energy, which has grown to become the largest builder of solar power plants in the U.S., with $1.5 billion in revenue last year, and the third-largest in the world.
Swinerton Renewable Energy has served the company as a platform for international growth. Over the past four years, it has built nine solar power plants in Canada, and a 750-MW solar power plant in Mexico.
Within its renewable energy unit, which is based in San Diego, Swinerton launched SOLV in 2012, a division focused on operating and maintaining solar utility plants. SOLV is now the largest company of its kind, managing more than 6 MW of power, and with 150 employees dedicated to that business. Last year, GTM Research and SOLICHAMBA identified SOLV the top service provider in the global operations and maintenance market for the second consecutive year.
Swinerton's new logo shows an architect and contractor pointing “outside the box,” which emphasizes the company's expanding into new businesses and markets. Image: Swinerton
Seeking better profit on work
Swinerton isn’t walking away from general contracting work; far from it. “We’re still a commercial GC at heart,” says Jeff Hoopes, a 34-year company vet who has been its CEO and Chairman since 2013. Under his leadership, Swinerton has expanded its reach beyond the western states by opening offices in Atlanta five years ago, Raleigh two years ago, and Charlotte last fall.
One of Swinerton’s larger current projects is Oceanwide Center, which it’s building in joint venture with the GC Webcor. When completed in 2021, Oceanwide’s two towers in San Francisco Transit Center district will include 265 residential units, a five-story-tall 26,000-sf public square, and a 169-key Waldorf Astoria hotel.
But it’s tough making money as a contractor, Hoopes laments. The industry averages only about 1% of a project’s revenue for contracting fees. “We’re looking at five times that” from the new businesses that Swinerton has moved into, Hoopes says.
So the company has been pulling away from government contracting projects, primarily because Congress has been inconsistent about funding them properly. Conversely, Swinerton is doing more co-investing with developer clients on projects like a 300-unit housing complex in Houston it recently worked on.
Hoopes says his company has also been transitioning into more self-perform work. It has 850 employees in California alone who do drywall. Swinerton designs and builds parking structures. And it wants to get into concrete pouring, and to either start up or purchase an electrical contractor. “We want to control more of every job,” says Hoopes.
Swinerton currently has around 2,000 “craft” workers in the field, along with 1,950 salaried employees, and 500-1,000 who work in the renewable energy business. When asked if, like many other GCs, his company has had trouble finding workers, Hoopes says that trades “want to work for a GC … because we’re employee owned, have good benefits, and offer career opportunities.”
Swinerton is 50% employee owned and 50% management owned. Its status as an ESOP is one of the reasons why Hoopes says he’s more concerned about growing Swinerton’s bottom line than he is about increasing its revenue, which nonetheless hit $4 billion last year and is projected to increase to $4.5 billion in 2018.
Swinerton is still committed to commercial building. One of its major projects is Oceanwide Center in San Francisco. Image: Swinerton
Still exploring new territories
To that end, Swinerton, with 15 offices and 11 practices, is looking at opening offices in New York and Chicago. It is also getting into the business of turning animal waste into energy. In July its plant on 42 acres in Warsaw, N.C., will be fully funded. That plant—which Swinerton owns in partnership with Carbon Cycle Energy—is set up to convert 4,200 tons of solid and liquid biodegradable materials per day to 6,500 dekatherms of biomethane gas. At full capacity, this plant will generate more than 1 billion cubic meters of pipeline-quality gas over the length of its 15-year contract with Duke Energy. That would be enough to power 32,000 houses.
Swinerton also has waste conversion plants in Phoenix and Missouri.
As part of its rebranding, Swinerton has made changes at its philanthropic arm, The Swinerton Foundation, which it started in 2002. The Foundation is transitioning from a private to a public nonprofit organization, and its new focus areas are equitable education, resilient communities, and workplace development.
Related Stories
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
| Oct 12, 2010
The Watch Factory, Waltham, Mass.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards — Gold Award. When the Boston Watch Company opened its factory in 1854 on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Mass., the area was far enough away from the dust, dirt, and grime of Boston to safely assemble delicate watch parts.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Cleveland, Ohio
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1894, to honor the memory of the more than 9,000 Cuyahoga County veterans of the Civil War.
| Oct 12, 2010
Building 13 Naval Station, Great Lakes, Ill.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. Designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt and constructed in 1903, Building 13 is one of 39 structures within the Great Lakes Historic District at Naval Station Great Lakes, Ill.
| Oct 12, 2010
Full Steam Ahead for Sustainable Power Plant
An innovative restoration turns a historic but inoperable coal-burning steam plant into a modern, energy-efficient marvel at Duke University.
| Oct 12, 2010
From ‘Plain Box’ to Community Asset
The Mid-Ohio Foodbank helps provide 55,000 meals a day to the hungry. Who would guess that it was once a nondescript mattress factory?