The firm is ranked No. 14 on this year’s Top Specialty Contractors list in the seven-state Mountain States and Southwest region that includes Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

ENR Regional Editor Jennifer Seward sat down with Rob Rarrick, HACI president, to learn more about the company’s new employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and how the contractor is leaning into other employee-oriented initiatives. The following Q&A has been edited and condensed.

What’s behind your recent growth spurt?

In Phoenix, the multifamily high-rise market has had some significant projects in the last three to four years, and while we generally don’t do a lot of that work, some of our long-standing clients brought us into those large projects, and they’ve been successful for us. But it really is attributable to a lot of things. Our service construction and retrofit and our hourly service and preventive maintenance divisions have grown substantially. There also have been good opportunities with government money coming out of COVID to support Arizona school districts, and we were a big part of that work.

We’ve had fairly large industrial projects, like JA Solar, and are involved in the largest hospitality project to date in Arizona, the VAI Resort in Glendale. We’ve also done a number of student housing projects, including Herberger at ASU [with Okland Construction] and a large expansion project for the Talking Stick Casino and Resort.

We’ve had so much work in recent years that we haven’t had the opportunity to enter the data center market, but now we’re ready, and we’d like to begin offering those services as well.

How are you navigating challenges like labor shortages and tariffs?

Labor is in a much better place today than it was in the last five years. There’s been a general slowing [of construction], and it’s enough to loosen up the labor market a little bit. Tariffs are a mixed bag. We’ve received hundreds of letters from equipment manufacturers and material suppliers indicating price increases. While around 25% of those have come to fruition, the rest have not. For the most part, we’ve been able to work [collaboratively] with our general contracting partners, and it hasn’t been too painful.

How do you differentiate HACI from the rest of the pack?

Tim King, our CEO, purchased the company in 1993 and added hydronic piping and plumbing services as well as design-build and design-assist, and he grew the company by doing significantly larger, more complex work. The biggest news for us is that over the last several months he and I have been working through an ESOP sale, and we are officially an employee-owned company. We have a lot of employees who have been here for many years, some for more than 30, and it felt important to give those individuals who have poured their heart into the company a stake in the company. Tim has a great reputation in the industry, and it’s an honor for us to continue that legacy. We looked at private equity acquisitions, but Tim and I were not looking to go down that road. We think being an ESOP sets us apart from the many [construction] firms that have been swallowed up by private equity. We’re looking forward to rebranding as an employee-owned company.

That’s a tremendous accomplishment. What else is HACI working on internally? Over the last five years, we’ve made a concerted effort to revamp our safety program, and we are undertaking a significant overhaul of our mental health services for our employees. We recently had a suicide of a longtime employee, and that really made me stop and embrace what we can do to help our employees. Construction has one of the highest suicide rates, and this is long overdue. We’ve created a mental health committee, and we’re doing an audit of the services we offer to see what is working and what more is needed. When we’re in a crisis with an employee, we’ve always seemed to be flying by the seat of our pants, but recently we’ve learned about resources through 988 [a suicide and crisis line], and the Phoenix fire department has crisis teams. We’re providing resources to our managers and identifying the steps that can be taken when needed. We’re early in the process. We’re having monthly roundtable discussions with 10 to 12 employees at a time on mental health. I have been surprised that some of the people I thought would push back the hardest have been the most receptive. At the end of the day, this is [just] a job; we all have families and loved ones, and that’s why we’re here in the first place.