On this year’s ENR MidAtlantic Specialty Contractor survey, the firm, founded in 1993, ranks TK with $24.66 million in revenue. The firm ranked No. 21 last year with $31.20 million in regional revenue and only performed $5.08 million in regional revenue in 2022, when the firm ranked 17th. Sure Steel also ranked No. 108 on the 2024 ENR national Top 600 Specialty Contractors list, reporting $383.7 million in 2023 revenue.

The CEO for ENR MidAtlantic’s 2024 Specialty Contractor of the Year, Daniel B. Miller, discussed Sure Steel’s MidAtlantic success with ENR Regional Editor Justin Rice. This Q&A has been edited and condensed.

 

Q&A

How and why did you start working in the MidAtlantic region?

In 2016 one of our customers came to us and said, ‘would you be interested in doing some [mission critical] work in Southern Virginia?’ We were successful at winning the opportunity. It was supposed to just be one job, but that job turned into many … We started hiring out east to do the work. We started getting a lot of local employees and one of our executives said, ‘I know we're not permanent here, but we've been here for two years. Let's make this work.’

 

All that work is based out of the Charlotte office. Do you plan to open an office in the MidAtlantic?

We will continue to grow in each region that we're present in, and if a certain area becomes more dominant than another, then we pay close attention to whether or not we need to have an office presence there.

 

Some firms say it’s hard to win work without a local office. That's not the case for you. Why?

Our customer base and the ability to travel as a company. We're able to be successful at the work we do, in large part because of our high regard to safety and quality, and we're production oriented, so you have the trifecta there. You can see it in our EMR (Experience Modification Rate). We're at a 0.38, which is an industry best as far as we're concerned, for an EMR. We'll put down just over a million and a half hours this year. We have a high-intensity focus on safety. We back that up in quality. We're an (American Institute of Steel Construction) AISC-certified director with the endorsements in things like deck and our quality standards. Whether or not we're doing mass timber, structural steel or metal buildings, we ensure that our quality standards follow the processes outlined by AISC. … And then, of course, production, we take on a lot of very big projects, and it's important for those projects to be completed on or ahead of time, and so we focus intently on our production rates. We measure them daily, making sure that we set and achieve our goals. And if something comes up to disrupt that, we have a plan in place where we can audible to be able to adapt and achieve the overall schedule.

 

Why does your business model to contract directly with GCs work well?

The business model is very logical. If you're a contractor, you want to buy from a subcontractor. And in the structural steel world for whatever reason—I don't understand the history of why it is this way—but a lot of all firms do is fabricate … so there's this intermediary supplier, between the subcontractor and the contractor, and that just logically, it doesn't work. And yet, for whatever reason, the industry has sustained that. Sure Steel works differently. We say, ‘No, no, no; suppliers need to supply.’ That's what they're good at. That's what they self-perform, and we want to buy what people are good at. We want our customers to buy what we're good at, which is we're a subcontractor, specialty contractor who self performs in house the construction of their projects. And we don't want an intermediary between us, and nor does the customer, and I think that the alignment there, it's much like an electrical or mechanical trade. You're buying from the trade. You're not buying from the supplier.

We have the management on staff to be able to go buy out that material from those vendors who are self-performing, and whether they're a fabricator or a supplier of miscellaneous metals, that's what we want to buy and that's what they ultimately want to sell. They just want to be part of the project. And this leapfrogging that has happened or happens in the industry, it may work for their business models, but for us, we need that person-to-person relationship between the contractor superintendent and our superintendent to be able to go make unencumbered decisions by a third party.

 

I assume being able to manage the supply chain yourself became hugely beneficial when COVID-19 broke out?

Absolutely, you're right. Rather than having the supplier make decisions on our behalf and then enforce those in a contract, we're making decisions on our own behalf, and the suppliers are supporting that. For us to be able to work through that, going through COVID specifically, and in the big boom that's happened in the construction industry since then, we absolutely needed that control.

 

Do you draw a direct line between this business model and your success?

Yes. We made the decision to do this in 2017 as a business. Before 2017, we didn't really pay attention to how a customer was buying it out. We were just like everyone else. It's about, ‘Yeah, we want to be able to do the work.’ But we took a look at the type of work we were doing in each contract structure, and we said, ‘Where do we get the best communication with the customer? And where does the customer get the best communication with us?’ Because communication, in large part, dictates the outcome. It's when people aren't communicating with each other that things tend to go awry on a project and you're not understanding each other. But if we have that direct communication line—like a contract allows when a contractor contracts directly to a subcontractor without a third-party supplier–between us, we can go make decisions together to benefit the outcome of the project and the customer.

 

A growing part of your business is installing hybrid structure steel-mass timber systems. Why does that make sense for you?

It makes sense to hire us as a structural firm to do that because it's structurally integrated into the projects. We're using mass timber shear walls. We're using it for flooring. In many cases, they can be used for your verticals, your columns, or your horizontals, your primary rafters, or even intermediary supports. What could be steel on one project with one design firm, on another firm, they may have that be more hybrid and one element is mass timber, as opposed to a structural steel element.

 

Why is incorporating mass timber into your business so important to the firm?

For us, it's about the customer. If the customer comes to us and they say, ‘Hey, here's what we've designed, we want to be able to build it so they don’t have to go hire multiple trades to be able to accomplish that, it's not very cost efficient for them, and for contractors, it's going to be a nightmare to coordinate those trades who are so cross dependent on each other during the construction process. But for us, we do it all under one umbrella. We're hoisting up the structural column, and then we're hoisting up the intermediary glue lamp, and then in the same hoisting is installing the CLT flooring.

 

Is it also important from the environmental impact aspect of it?

Certainly. There's a big push by our customers, specifically that we're on board with, to be able to make sure that their facilities, their buildings, that they're producing as they build their infrastructure, are reducing the carbon footprint in the US and across the world.

 

What's the most gratifying part about the industry?

That we get to build things. We're on this [Zoom] meeting right now. The data for it is being stored in data centers that Sure Steel builds. You took a flight to go to the [ENR MidAtlantic Best Projects] award ceremony [in Baltimore]. Depending on the airline, you're probably coming from an airline, and we built their maintenance hangers that they use to fix the airplanes so that they're operational.

 

How will the second Trump Administration impact the steel industry?

In construction, the reality is, it comes down to whether people who need new facilities are investing in that now or later. And we hope they continue to invest so we can continue to build.

 

What's next?

It really is a great group of people here at Sure Steel. We plan to continue to invest in our people. Training is a big thing for us. I want everybody to be an industry expert, and there's only one way to do that, and it's to put in the hours and learn, and us to be able to provide opportunities for them.