Schwob Building Company and Champions DFW and Champions DFW Commercial Realty, LLC shared the blueprint for their relationship on Texas Money & Business (620 AM KEXB). Jim Kelley, along with show host Ron Taylor, welcomed two guests from Schwob in this edition of the radio show and podcast.
Jim: I’m very excited today to introduce a couple of gentlemen that are fabulous vendor partners. I’ve known them for a while now and they do an outstanding job in their particular vertical market that they service. They are what we would term a developer and building vendor partner. So I’m going to introduce this morning Mr. Tony Rader and Mr. Matt Miller. And I’m going to start with you, Mr. Tony. Could you give us a bio on yourself? And then we’ll follow with Matt.
Tony: Yeah, Jim and Ron, thanks for having us today. Schwob Building Company, I’ve been working there for a little while with Schwob. And Schwob’s around 38 years. I’ve been in the industry 35 years. My background has been all commercial development. I serve with the Associated Builders and Contractors of America. I’m on the Executive Committee Board there. I also was a past president of the AGC office here in Dallas. So I’ve gotten to know a lot of the contractors and a lot of the markets over the years. Living North Richland Hills, family, three kids, grandkids, more important about the grandkids than it is the kids now. But my passion has always been construction, always, with my dad starting years ago in construction, back at 13 years old on a tractor mowing and doing excavation work at 13. It’s gotten in my blood.
Matt: Thanks for having me, Jim, Ron. Pleasure to be here. My name is Matt Miller. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. I went to school in Cleveland at undergrad, and then came to Dallas in the mid-’90s and started out in the medical office building business. So my entire career has been in commercial real estate in some form or fashion. Moved from medical office into the investment side, and worked for a number of years, investing equity and just development deals across a variety of product types, so everything from multi-family to retail, industrial, and single-family lot developments. So a very diverse background coming at the business from that angle. And then came to partner with Schwob on land development deals, build-to-suit deals. Of course there’s a whole suite of construction services running behind, and that’s what Schwob is known for and what we do every day when we get out of bed. And then every once in a while, that opportunity comes up to do something a little different with a client or speculatively.
Jim: Well, that’s a great intro. I want Mr. Tony now to give us a brief synopsis and a summary of Schwob companies and what it is that you do.
Tony: Yes. Schwob Building Company started 38 years ago primarily as a pre-engineered metal building erector. And we’ve grown into being one of the top three to four in the United States as far as largest erectors in the United States, around 400 employees. We have several divisions now. We do ground up construction, which would be all types of commercial construction. We focus a lot on auto dealerships. We’ve got an extensive résumé for auto dealerships. So when you’re probably going about your Lexus or your Toyota or your Ford, you’ve probably seen one of our dealerships in the Metroplex. We also have a big history with trucking and transportation industry, the people that bring you the foods and the products. We worked for all the major long haulers there.
And then we have our office staff, which does general construction work of all types of maintenance facilities, office buildings, three-to-four-story high, small buildings across the United States. We’re focused primarily in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, but we also have a US presence. Our superintendents travel. And we have offices in Kansas City, and we have offices in also Houston. Well, with those offices, we’ve gotten into the energy market. So we have an energy market that does midstream oil and gas work. The Chesapeakes and so forth will drill the well. From that point forward, we’ll take it and put all the pipes in and interconnect it back to the main lines. So that’s the energy side of the business.
And then we have our fueling division, which is a really interesting division. When people think of fueling, they go, “What are you talking about?” Well, imagine, for instance, Google has a big data center, and they have 40, 30 generators out there. Well, they need fuel to generate the power for those generators. We design and we implement those systems. We also do a lot of federal work in that market, some of the specialized Department of Defense work. So those guys work all over the United States. But with our 400 people, we’ve got a breadth of ability to be able to come in and look at it like a trucking or an auto dealership and take the pieces of land, like Matt says, and really dive down into it to figure out the parts and pieces of that piece of land and with that building when we work with Jim or we work with Matt and his group in looking at that. What’s the best way to bring that owner’s vision out there in front of them so he can turn the keys and operate that business? So it’s a great business, been 38 years.
This is a very intriguing interview with Jim, Ron, Tony and Matt from the Schwob Building Company. They take a deep dive into the DFW market and beyond throughout this nearly hour-long podcast. Listen below, or visit this podcast on iTunes.
Learn more about Jim Kelley and Champions DFW, here.
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