New jobs, overhead control hold key for Clark & Sullivan

Clark & Sullivan Construction has started work on a $24.4 million courthouse project in Susanville, a key step for the company after it wrapped up work on the $54 million Center of Molecular Medicine at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The company expects to be profitable in its fiscal year that ends in September, says Kevin Stroupe, its chief financial officer, and it has enough work on the books for next year already to cover its overhead costs.

The Sparks-based company's overhead, however, is dramatically lower than the days of the great construction boom in northern Nevada.

While revenues have declined by 50 percent from their peak, Stroupe says Clark & Sullivan's overhead has been reduced by 60 percent. The payroll today includes 38 salaried staff. Two years ago, it employed as many as 227 salaried workers.

"It hasn't been easy emotionally," says B.J. Sullivan, the company's president and chief executive. "It's been very tough."

The cutbacks mean, too, that everyone in the company's headquarters is a lot closer to customers.

Sullivan, for instance, rides the Southwest shuttle to Las Vegas every week these days as he works as Clark & Sullivan's area manager in southern Nevada along with his other duties.

And Stroupe says decision-making is much faster because the company now operates with a management team of three, down from 10 executives when times were booming.

The smaller staff keeps closely focused.

On the Susanville courthouse job, for instance, Clark & Sullivan was by far the smallest of the 19 companies that sought the job.

"We worked harder than anyone else," says Sullivan.

The company also has kept an open mind about working arrangements that might not have gotten a second glance in earlier years.

Clark & Sullivan is working as a subcontractor to Spanish Springs Construction Inc. on a job at Creech Air Force Base in Las Vegas. It's taken minority positions in joint ventures with a couple of smaller contractors on projects at Sierra College's Nevada County Campus in Grass Valley, Calif.

But Stroupe says the company won't change one of its strategies: Strong discipline in its bidding.

"We've refused to lose money on jobs," he says. "That's not going to work in the long term."

Already, he says, some builders are beginning to fall as the result of over-aggressive pricing, and that lessens competition for the few new contracts that are available.

Along with the big projects the building at UNR, the courthouse at Susanville Clark & Sullivan has landed a stream of smaller jobs.

Its Sacramento office just completed, for instance, an $8 million modernization of schools for California's Robla School District. The challenge: The work needed to be complete in 43 days, a schedule that Clark & Sullivan met.

And it continues to work on projects such as a new pharmacy at Renown Regional Medical Center in downtown Reno, where a joint venture involving Clark & Sullivan completed construction of the 10-story Tahoe Tower in 2007.

"They've been a wonderful client," Sullivan says.