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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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Enterprise—Nielsen Dillingham continues to build its reputation

Employee-owned Nielsen Dillingham Builders is the largest local commercial construction company, according to the San Diego Business Journal’s latest Book of Lists, a fact its executives attribute to everyone at the company watching the bottom line and trying to develop new business.

The company specializes in large commercial construction projects, including office and industrial buildings, said President Larry Geiser. It also builds water and wastewater facilities. Among its recently completed projects are the Mott’s apple juice bottling plant in Tecate, Mexico and Qualcomm Stadium’s expansion.

Crews are working on the Downtown baseball stadium; at the 80,000-square-foot Pacific Plaza; and the 50,000-square-foot Torrey View Corporate Center, both in Sorrento Mesa. Nielsen Dillingham teamed up with locally based Douglas E. Barnhart Inc. and Clark Construction Co. of Bethesda, Md., to build the baseball stadium.

The legal controversy that has delayed the issuance of bonds to finance the baseball stadium is of concern to the company, Geiser said.

“It’s unfortunate that the city council finds itself in this position when it has been clearly mandated by the voters that this project should move forward,” Geiser said.

The company is also moving into retrofitting hospitals and health care facilities for earthquake resistance after passage of California Senate Bill 1953. It requires all medical facilities in the state to be strengthened.

Penny Lawlor, director of marketing, said no figures are yet available from hospitals across California on how much the retrofitting will cost.

Medical facilities are required to submit their retrofitting plans to the state by January 2001, she said.

The firm, which started in 1945 in San Diego County as Nielsen Construction Co., merged six years ago with Dillingham Construction of Pleasanton. The company currently employs 300 to 500 people in the San Diego office, depending on the workload. Companywide, approximately 700 people work for the firm.

It had $386 million in sales in 1999.

It also has several branch offices, said Mike Archibald, vice president of the commercial construction division in San Diego. The branch offices are in Lakewood, Pleasanton, Portland, Ore., and Tijuana.

The company takes pride in being able to not only build, but also design large projects, Archibald said. The Qualcomm Stadium expansion was originally estimated to take 20 months to complete, but Nielsen Dillingham’s crews designed and built it in just eight months in 1997, Archibald said.

The company is headquartered in a 25,000-square-foot building on Jefferson Street near the San Diego Sports Arena. Archibald said the central location is convenient for staging jobs.

There’s a multiple server computer network at headquarters linked to job sites and branch offices, he said. Projects are managed through the use of Expedition software by Primavera. The program also tracks requests for information from architects and property owners.

For job cost estimates, the company uses Timberline construction software and also Lotus-based software, he added. “We also have a Web site with information on projects under way,” Archibald said.

Project managers and superintendents carry Nextel cellular phone-radios to speed communications. Each superintendent has a digital camera so design errors can be quickly E-mailed to architects for corrections, he said.

The company also has a computer-assisted drafting (CAD) department where architectural drawings are diagrammed to allow company officials to suggest economical design changes. It’s a somewhat new use of CAD, he said.

It also helps project teams understand how the building will be put together out in the field, he said. The average project the company takes on usually ends up with 10-20 percent of the work done by its employees. Subcontractors perform the rest of the work.

“We’ve established quite a few relationships with subcontractors and use them whenever they can do a particular job more economically than we can in-house,” Archibald said. “We try to focus on more complicated projects because of our technological edge and the relatively high experience level of our employees.”

Most of the workers have been with the company from 15 to 30 years, he said.

An employee stock ownership plan helps retention. So do regular training programs that train the workers in a variety of construction skills.

“Our employees know there is a career path here they can follow,” said Archibald, who has been with the company since 1983. “It isn’t just a job.”

The company sells itself with its reputation, said another company official.

“The best marketing you can do is a good job,” Lawlor said. “We also donate work and materials to charitable projects and each manager also tries to look for contract opportunities.”

Nielsen Dillingham is one of the volunteer builders working on Monarch High School in Downtown, a school for homeless and disadvantaged teens.

Nielsen Dillingham tries to build long-term relationships with architects as well. This is done by providing cost information to the architects while they are designing a project, Lawlor said.

There’s also a newsletter that’s sent to customers that keeps the company’s name in front of them through updates on projects being built.

Lawlor takes prospective customers through buildings the company has completed as well to show them their quality. She’s recently been taking hotel developers through the Hyatt Aventine near La Jolla Village Drive and Emerald Plaza in Downtown. The company built both.

Archibald and the other Nielsen Dillingham employees are concerned about the high price of housing here as well, he said.

“There has to be a partnership between government and industry to create affordable housing in central areas such as City Heights,” Archibald said. “We see a lot of luxury, high-rise condo projects, but there needs to be affordable housing built as well.”

Mike Jones, a vice president with A.O. Reed & Co., a San Diego plumbing contractor that has subcontracted with Nielsen Dillingham for several decades, praised the company’s ability to handle complicated projects.

Chris Veum, a principal in the San Diego architectural firm of Austin Veum Robbins Parshalle, has worked on several projects with Nielsen Dillingham. The most recent project was the Mott’s Apple Juice bottling facility across the border in Tecate, a 67,000-square-foot steel frame structure.

“We worked with the Nielsen Dillingham folks out of their Tijuana office,” Veum said.

“It was a very successful arrangement because we had many informative meetings with the construction company and the client to keep everybody in touch with what was going on,” Veum said. “Nielsen Dillingham employees were extremely helpful at suggesting economy measures that didn’t compromise the building.”

He said he was excited to be working with Nielsen Dillingham on the recently announced Park Laurel high-rise condominium project near Balboa Park.

“We’ve been working very closely with them on the Park Laurel project and they’ve shown the same high level of ability they have on our previous projects,” Veum said. “We are extremely comfortable working on a large-scale project with them.”

He attributed Nielsen Dillingham’s success to the company’s ability to retain employees.

“Their ability to keep people with their organization is extremely good because of the current shortage of experienced construction people,” Veum said.

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