A Jewel Called Jewett

by Jonathan McGaha | 1 June 2014 12:00 am

Customer service, integrity, cost control and safety drive this company

Ninety percent of Raymond, N.H.-based Jewett Construction Co.’[1]s business is brought in via repeat/referral customers. A competitor, one of New England’s largest design-build contractors with whom Jewett has often butted heads, actually hired Jewett to supply and erect a hangar in New Hampshire. These two plaudits are a result of being one of New England’s premier design-build construction contractors.

Jewett Construction is a second-generation, family-run company dedicated to delivering high quality and solid value to a wide-ranging client base. It specializes in design-build projects, construction management work and general contracting services for clients in a variety of markets. For more than 40 years, it’s put the needs of its clients first and has built its reputation on honesty, accountability, safety and hard work.

Craig Jewett, second-generation owner and president of Jewett Construction, stresses customer service to his employees. It’s the credo that birthed the company. “The opportunity we saw was a quality-driven, customer-service business; that’s where we wanted to go,” he says. “Put the right people in the seats and it has worked. We are clientcentered even before the job starts, during and several years after. I took over from my dad 15 years ago and it took me a few years to really appreciate and understand this: the importance of repeat business. That’s what we instill in all our employees, no matter what level: client-centered success.”

Expansion and adjustment

Jewett Construction has several niche markets (auto dealerships, structural steel and pre-engineered metal buildings) they’ve developed and succeeded in. But, “We don’t try to be everything to everybody,” Jewett says. “Probably 90 percent of our work is from referral or repeat customers- something that says a lot about quality, integrity and service-and some 80 percent is negotiated; we don’t do much actual bidding anymore.”

The company has always built steel buildings, but a few years ago it established a specialized division, Jewett Metal Buildings
& Steel Erectors (JMB), to better serve the commercial, industrial, retail and institutional markets all over New England. “We are one of very few construction companies in the area with its own in-house metal erecting crew,” Jewett says.

Not content to thrive in a small region, Jewett Construction has tapped new markets via expansion. This was a secret for the company’s success during recent difficult economic times. According to Jewett, this involved, “finding that niche market, putting the infrastructure in place and nurturing it, so we’re ready and in place when those markets expand as we did with the JMB division. Same with our Jewett Automotive Design and Construction division-another division we ramped up during the adjustments in 2008. We’ve since completed more than 50 renovations, additions and new facilities. The metals component of such projects comprises the majority of the job.”

Geographical expansion has been part of its success. “We have established contacts up in Maine and Maine is a state that is ripe for metal building construction,” Jewett says. Because there are so few metal building contractors in Maine, Jewett calls it, “a void and an opportunity.” Many employees on Jewett’s crew are from Maine so that has helped. The company also reaches out to Massachusetts and Connecticut for work too.

Staying innovative

To keep up with its expansion, and ensure and monitor its success, Jewett Construction has gone high tech. It purchased a cloud-based server because of all its travel in other states. The server allows a Jewett Construction steel erection foreman on a job site to have a virtual office in a pick-up truck.

“It’s pretty interesting to see what can be done without using file transfer protocol (FTP) sites and without other log-in tools,” Jewett says. “We can get reports and condition pictures on iPads. Even in metal building construction if you don’t keep up with technology you are going to get bowled over. It’s coming fast and furious. It has the ability to communicate real-time information like ‘How many mainframes did you get up safely today?’ Taking the picture and recording the data is an interesting concept. We can get cost updates weekly with that information. It’s important because erection crews are somewhat remote from time to time. The cloud is a little expensive, but the guys who know how it can help the foreman in the field are the ones who are going to win in the future.”

Additionally, Jewett Construction is using a lot of time studies, analytical reporting, historical data analysis and real-time scorekeeping. “We are really zeroing in on historical data,” Jewett says. “Time studies with insulated metal panels, trim, doors and mainframes. Getting all the information in a database available to us is really interesting. It would be interesting to sit down with contractors across the country and compare labor hours in certain situations.”

Jewett projects

An outstanding metal-related Jewett Construction project is a 13,750-square-foot department of public works garage completed for the Town of Hopkinton, N.H. After the former facility was destroyed by fire, Jewett Construction worked with Port One Architects, Portsmouth, N.H., to design a new, state-ofthe- art facility. It’s a pre-engineered, energy-efficient metal building with insulated wall and roof panels, a structural steel mezzanine, and radiant heating in the concrete slab flooring powered by an innovative wood chip boiler heating system with an exterior storage silo for wood chips. Jewett says the project was completed both on time and within budget.

Jewett Construction’s 2012 renovation of a tired auto dealership into the 77,000-square-foot Grappone Toyota dealership and service facility in Bow, N.H., became the first LEED-certified automotive dealership in the Northeast. It was a challenging renovation that required a great deal of design creativity, as the minimal expansion allowed by local building codes necessitated working within the existing footprint. Green energy-saving technologies included 32 separate, 400-foot-deep geothermal wells to help heat and cool the building, and greatly reduce its energy consumption, in addition to 36 water source heat pumps, seven recycling stations and two electric vehicle-charging stations.

Due to Jewett Construction’s transparency and safety record, the cost-efficiency of its pricing, and the metal suppliers it’s chosen to partner with, expect more innovative and high-quality Jewett projects. The fact that the JMB division is regularly hired by its own competitors to supply and install both conventional and pre-engineered metal buildings is proof of that.

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Company Profile

Year Founded: 1972

Location: Raymond, N.H., and Scarborough, Maine Geographic

Areas of Service: New England and Eastern N.Y. Services Offered: Pre-construction, construction, post-construction, design-build, green buildings and LEED certification, pre-engineered metal buildings

Number of Employees: approximately 9 staff employees and 21 field employees

Metal Building Square Footage Installed:

2013: 250,000 square feet

2012: 227,000 square feet

2011: 158,000 square feet

2010: 75,000 square feet

2014 Revenue projection: Approximately $22 million

2013 Total revenue: Approximately $19 million

Management Team: Craig Jewett, President Sam Amato, Senior Estimator and Vice President of Planning and Pre-Construction Tom Morton, Estimator and Development Director, JMB Division

Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/a-jewel-called-jewett/

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