< Previous Written by Ryan Cartner“How we’ve been successful in business,” says Steve Wier, company owner and president, “is that we take care of business. We keep owners happy.” Keeping owners happy is something of a truism at Wier, and the prin-ciple runs through every aspect of the business. The company believes that building strong, long-lasting business relationships through hard work and integrity is vital to running a successful construction company. Doing business in this way has resulted in the company working predominant-ly with repeat clients. Building car dealerships and kidney dialysis clinics make up a large portion of its work, and it has built hundreds of each, but the company also works on offices and commercial build-ings, industrial structures, retail stores and much more. The vast majority of the projects on which Wier works are negotiated, rather than competitively bid. Because the company works hard to maintain relationships, the jobs often come to it. Steve Wier graduated from Texas A&M University in 1982 with a degree in construction engineering and spent nearly a decade working in commercial construction. During the course of his “Working closely with customers and offering guidance from the beginning helps protect the building owner’s investment.”30 FEBRUARY 2018 work in the field, he had noticed that, when they would bid a job where the client did not have a contractor involved during the design, they would pay the architect and often end up without enough money to fund the build. “I realized that there was a market for somebody who could work with the owners and keep the cost under control,” says Wier.Wier Enterprises was built on this idea, and now, the company is recognized as an asset to the many clients with which it works. The team is brought into projects when preliminary designs are being drawn and works with the owners and the architects to offer advice regarding the viability of the project’s costs. Working closely with customers and offering guidance from the beginning helps protect the building owner’s investment.Steve Wier believes wholeheartedly in the value of hard work and honesty in business, and it was these values that spawned his company. There was a point early in his career, when he intended to leave the field of construction entirely. A few months after having resigned, he began receiving job offers from architects and owners he had worked with in the past.The company started with dry cleaning stores followed by car washes, but when a company he had worked with on a 31 CONSTRUCTION IN FOCUS car dealership called to hire him for a similar project, things really began to take off. From that point, automotive projects became an important source of business for Wier. From its very beginning, Wier treated every job, regardless of size, with the same level of care and the same work ethic.During this time, a local hospital began directing patients who needed dialysis treatment to private practices. Doctors were opening dialysis clinics throughout the region to absorb the overflow, and Wier happened to have a working relationship with a person involved in one of those projects who requested that he bid on the job. He did, and the quality of service that customer received from Wier resulted in more job offers. Today “I realized that there was a market for somebody who could work with the owners and keep the cost under control.”the company has constructed over three hundred dialysis clinics and generally has around five under construction at any given time. Wier’s regular territory includes Louisiana and Oklahoma but the majority of the work it does is in Texas. Within these areas, the company projects that it will do more than $170 million of business this year. “People do work with people they like,” says Wier. “You have to be able to keep owners happy. We’ve been able to do that.”Keeping customers happy might be a simple thing, but it is something that Wier has been able to do quite successfully for FEBRUARY 201832 many years. By keeping low overhead, the company has a com-petitive edge on pricing, and by treating subcontractors fairly and with respect, it has formed relationships with dependable workers who are happy to work on job after job. Wier’s success is built on the idea that if it does good work, the work will keep coming. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, in my opinion, to know what you have to do to be successful,” says Wier. This is a relationship company, and well over seventy percent of its work is negotiated with returning customers. When the company approaches new prospects, the references and testimonials from those returning customers tend to be persuasive.The company takes great pride in its reputation, and when it does make a mistake, it is committed to making it right and works hard to be fair to everyone in everything it does. This instills confidence, and once a customer works with Wier, they tend to stay with Wier. Competitors who attempt to lure the company’s clients find that the relationship and the confidence they feel are difficult barriers to overcome. The company was recently awarded two $40 million Lexus dealership projects. Many of Weir’s competitors are multina-tional corporations, but as a result of its reputation and assur-ance of quality work, the company consistently land projects of enormous scale. Wier is one of the top twenty contractors in Texas, and according to Steve Wier, it is simply a matter of taking care of business and doing the right thing. “There’s no secret to it. Just get out there and do what you have to do, and you’ll grow,” says Wier. The company truly embodies the values of its founder. Steve lives by the rule of treating others as he would want to be treated and is not afraid of hard work. He has thoroughly ingrained these qualities in the culture of his company. “We’re friends before we start a job, and we’re friends after we finish the job. It’s just like anything in life. If you have someone you like being around, you’re going to want to work with them.” “There are a lot of people out there who can build build-ings,” says Wier. “It’s funny; I don’t really have a salesforce. The whole company is our sales force. I don’t want to have people out there just selling work. If my guys are doing things right, that’s sales.”33 CONSTRUCTION IN FOCUS FEBRUARY 201834 Congestion has become the new reality for those living in ever-evolving metropolises of this country. Population increase in cities is a sure sign of essential economic growth, competitiveness and prosperity. Cities such as Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, have become attractive places to live, work and play for both amenities and cultural diversity. But it takes forethought in planning to ensure the sustained attractiveness of such communities. According to Statistics Canada’s 2016 census of met-ropolitan areas, eighty-two percent of Canadians are urban dwellers for those cities of more than 90,000. This statistic most likely will increase to eighty-eight percent by 2050 according to the census. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto are among this country’s largest cities and although city living is enticing, cities such as these can expand beyond their infrastructure capacity. This will become a lingering and growing problem if effective initiatives are not implemented. Congestion, specifically heavy traffic and gridlock, diminishes the much sought after quality of life and health of a city and also leads to decreased productivity, loss of competitiveness and environmental concerns in the form of greenhouse gases emissions. Congestion imposes a tremendously stressful inconvenience when it translates into increased commute times. In fact, for large cities, if one was to find the sum time that every driver spent in gridlock, it would be as many as 10,000 years annually, according to a report released in 2017 by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. This is a concern for residents and businesses that rely on effi-cient and timely transportation systems. This, in turn, broadens into a larger concern for the whole of the Canadian economy, if not appropriately addressed.But there may be some relief for the traffic dilemma, particu-larly in Toronto, which has this country’s most heavily used highway artery − the 401 − pass through the city. According to a Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) report, there are long-term plans in place to at least tame the traffic beast, and Mayor John Tory is devoted to this cause. Written by Anne Lindert-Wentzell“Congestion imposes a tremendously stressful inconvenience when it translates into increased commute times.”35 CONSTRUCTION IN FOCUS “I am going to keep at this traffic issue every day that I hold this office,” Mayor Tory told reporters in September 2017. “We’re going to keep bringing new measures in to try to move this city better.” Toronto has made progress in the form of past traffic manage-ment strategies developed through the city’s Roundtable on Gridlock and Traffic Congestion, the Downtown Transportation Operations Study, a Congestion Management Plan and Toron-to’s Official Plan. Six initiatives are being considered which include extend-ing a pilot project from 2017 that proved to be effective and involved deploying police officers to manage traffic flow at recognized bottlenecks in the city. The mayor noted that changes to Ontario’s Traffic Act now enable authorized traffic wardens, rather than police officers, to monitor both car traffic and pedestrians at the city’s busiest intersections and, possibly, around construction areas. This measure (Traffic 2.0) is to be ini-tiated early this year. Another pilot project launched in November 2017 involves installing ‘smart’ traffic signals at some major intersections across the city. It is an attempt to update the city’s traffic signal infrastructure which has been in place since the early 1990s. This pilot project will compare two technologies – InSync and Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (SCATS) – to assess their effectiveness. After one year, one of them will be devel-oped for future implementation. The two systems have live communication between signals to synchronize traffic flow by adjusting signal timing accord-ingly. “The city is finally moving into the twenty-first century and embracing technology that can improve traffic,” Mayor Tory said in a press release last November. “Over the last three years, we have finally focused on fighting traffic in Toronto and improving commute times. I am determined to build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight each and every day.” As part of the solution, last year, Toronto’s joined forces with Waze, a navigation application that was launched in 2006 and I used not only in growing cities in North America but in numerous cities worldwide. Toronto is Canada’s nineteenth city to adopt the app and has close to 560,000 users in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The city aligned with Waze for its ability to provide real-time traffic data which gives users the information to plan their routes around the city, avoiding such things as road closures, construction zones or accidents. When speaking with reporters, both Mayor Tory and Waze Canada’s manager, Michael Wilson, indicated that this part-nership was at no cost to either the city or Waze. Wilson said that, ‘Having the most accurate navigation information in “It is no surprise that vehicles are one of a city’s greatest sources of air pollution.”FEBRUARY 201836 Waze can only help create a better navigation experience for everyone on the roads.” Currently, there are two rapid response teams or quick clear squads, assigned to clear downtown roads and main arteries such as the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway, of vehicles blocking traffic flow. These teams are dispatched by the city’s traffic operation centre to locations where there are known lane blockages. These teams will be fully operational by 2018 during rush hours and on the weekends. “The bottom line is that we have to get them cleared out,” Mayor Tory said in a news conference in early November. He suggested that such impediments not only disrupt traffic, but they also pose a safety issue. Utility companies such as the city’s hydroelectric, gas and tele-communications companies will be asked to conduct all non-emergency projects requiring lane closures during non-peak hours – from 7pm to 7am. Such activities during peak business hours lead to traffic disruptions and must now be a thing of the past according to Mayor Tory. “We are going to be sending the message loud and clear: this kind of emergency work cannot take place any longer during the day,” he has been noted as saying. And lastly, the city will be looking at increasing fines for traf-fic-blocking offences. Rush-hour route enforcement has been launched by the Toronto Police Services to prevent gridlock, particularly in the city’s downtown core. For those subjected to traffic jams, particularly on a daily basis, there is no arguing that it can take its toll on both physical and mental health; job security and choice; safety and, more impor-tantly, quality of life. But also to be considered are detrimental factors such as decreased air quality. It is no surprise that vehicles are one of a city’s greatest sources of air pollution. Slow moving or idling vehicles produce more pollution than vehicles travelling at highway speeds while increasing fuel costs and noise pollution. Investing heavily in and encouraging the use of public transit may solve part of the problem, especially if employers provide incentives for those who use such means of transportation. But the reality is that most do not want to give up the comfort of their own vehicle, whatever the cost.Perhaps rising fuel costs will help with the decision, but for now, foresight will remain the most effective tool in keeping our cities moving in the most efficient way. Toronto, along with other large cities in this country, needs to remain devoted to the cause.“Currently, there are two rapid response teams or quick clear squads, assigned to clear downtown roads and main arteries.”37 CONSTRUCTION IN FOCUS FEBRUARY 201838 Becco Contractors, Inc. is a family-owned-and-operated heavy road construction company that serves the city and the state in different rural areas around Oklahoma. Its key areas of expertise include bridge construction, earthworks, concrete paving, asphalt paving, underground utilities and trucking.Next >