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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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July 2021 #13264 Page #145
The Last Word on... Commercial Trusses Joe Kannapell, P.E.
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ith surging housing demand, 1981 was much like 2021. Yet, in the midst of overflowing residential orders, a gutsy CM decided to take a chance on a different line of business. His painful memories of housing’s boom-bust cycles, and his Harvard education, told him to diversify. Ricks Wilson, owner of Truss and Component Co., hired a PE to focus on the untapped commercial sector – and that PE was me! And Wilson’s vision was prescient. Just two years after my arrival, housing collapsed, and the repetitive commercial truss business that I delivered helped us significantly. Then as now, as residential development ebbed, commercial construction continued to grow. In 2021, many associate the term “commercial” exclusively with large apartment jobs. They often shun such all-consuming projects to avoid tying up their plants and upsetting homebuilder clients. But with the proper engineering talent, why not attack the more manageable and more repetitive commercial structures – meaning “buildings not lived in” – that may fit into tight production schedules and may yield higher margins? In the 1980s, we built dozens of McDonald’s restaurants in Texas with long runs of trusses. I’d get a phone call saying, “Send a 34x84 store to Port Arthur, Texas,” and I’d just send the cutting to the shop. Yes, McDonald’s got fancier over the years, but several CMs are proving that the franchise business is still healthy and profitable.
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