RC Andersen is a well-known, expert builder in the industrial sector, helping clients build facilities across the country for nearly 20 years.
But recently, when a long-time client asked if they could take on a 130,625sf ground-up building in Maryland, the RCA team faced a tough decision.
“Our workload was nearly at capacity. We looked at our resources and our availability to get to Maryland, and the real answer was no,” says Neil Ascione, president of RC Andersen. “But we didn’t want to let our client down, so we asked STO Building Group leadership if our Alliance Partners could help.”
STOBG’s Alliance Partner network includes approximately 60 third-party general contracting and construction management firms in cities across the globe, with about a dozen of those contracted in established master service agreement (MSA) partnerships. When a local STOBG builder isn’t available to take on a project for a client, these firms step in to essentially serve as an extension of our local team.
“What it means to be an Alliance Partner,” says Dave Ransome, vice president in STO Building Group’s Global Services team, “is that you are culturally aligned with our client-first attitude. It means that you partner with us to realize our client’s vision, and that we trust each other infinitely.”
RC Andersen joined the STO Building Group in 2021, understanding that one of the key benefits was access to this network of resources. Now was their chance to put it into practice. “We had been telling our clients about the benefits of being part of STOBG, and this was our opportunity to show them,” Ascione says.
STOBG’s Global Services team and CEO Bob Mullen connected RCA to GCS-SIGAL, a Washington, DC-based general contractor with nearly 50 years of experience building the DC metro area. With its location in Prince George’s County, just outside of Washington, DC, the project would be subject to the county’s very intensive review and inspection procedures. GCS-SIGAL’s specific local expertise, says RC Andersen project executive Colin Warnick, was exactly what the project team needed.
“If we had gone into the project thinking we would know how to handle that level of bureaucracy, we would have been blindsided,” says Warnick. “GCS-SIGAL lives and breathes it every day and understands how the layers and processes affect the project schedule.”
So, between RC Andersen’s extensive expertise in building warehouses and GCSSIGAL’s in building in Prince George’s County, the team was able to hit the ground running, assigning a super from each company to the project and an on-site project manager from GCS-SIGAL who coordinated with RC Andersen regularly.
“I spoke with the GCS-SIGAL PM, Corinna Chan, daily,” says Warnick. “I was very familiar with the client’s preferences and processes from our years of working with them, and she was able to tackle the day-to-day needs of the project. I was initially nervous about not being there to micromanage every stage, but the communication between us became so good that we really lost nothing. I would work with that team on any project.”
GCS-SIGAL agrees, according to senior vice president Mark Abbott. “Bob Mullen was the great connector who pulled this partnership together, and we are extremely proud of the rewarding and successful delivery of the project for the client,” he says. As for the client themselves? Ascione says they appreciated RC Andersen’s quick action to go the extra mile to get the project completed successfully.
“They had started preconstruction on the project with another GC, and were not satisfied,” he says. “They were thankful we brought in a local GC who really knows the area and that we helped them show their tenant that they were aggressively working to get the project done.”