Alfa Tech

Source: Technology Digital

Date :17/03/2008 12:15:14

Alfa Tech Cambridge Group founder and CEO Jeff Fini and Senior Principal of Technology, Rich Garrison explain how the company grew from a one-man enterprise to an international corporation at the cutting-edge of construction project delivery

Written by Emmet Cole and Produced by John Ellingwood

The Alfa Tech Cambridge Group – which offers design and construction management services of large-scale projects from healthcare, pharmaceutical, high tech, educational, and movie studios - started small. It had just one man in a single, small office. The story couldn’t be more different today: ATCG is now a $150million global engineering design firm.

Commitment and growth

Fini started his one-man company in 1987, but expanded to employ 14 people by the end of the first year. Almost instantly, the company gained a solid reputation for building engineering and technology design. In the years that followed, Fini completed five mergers and steered the company to a healthy average of ten percent revenue growth per year.

But Fini insists that revenues alone should never drive the company’s growth goals. Rather, ATCG expanded because its clients demanded it. “Due to providing good service and developing good client relationships, we started getting a highly regarded reputation and the company started growing,” Fini says. “The clients would ask for us to be more and more involved in the project, so we expanded to do bigger jobs and more complicated projects.”

In the mid-90s, Fini transitioned the company into a regular corporation. Following further mergers, Fini found his company evolving into a complete construction and project management provider. At this point, Fini knew his company would need to expand again to effectively meet the growing needs of their clients.

“It is a turnkey solution. We take full responsibility of everything from programming and design to construction,” Fini says. “At that time, we were very good on the design, but we needed to add expertise to our project construction management.”

Fini found Cambridge, a firm which offered project delivery expertise including project and construction-management company based out of Palo Alto and Los Angeles, California, and the two companies merged into a comprehensive design and management-provider, loaded with quality expertise in all phases of construction, from MEP design to budget management.

Impressive projects

ATCG currently pulls in $150 million a year in revenues, has 150 full-time employees, and is growing at a steady ten percent clip. The project and construction management side has already grown 20 percent since its merger with Cambridge. In May 2006, the San Francisco Business Journal named ATCG its 22nd Fastest Growing Private Business.

Fini’s business approach focuses more on clients than numbers. “We have looked for our growth to be approximately ten percent per year and to not expand it too fast,” he says. “I’d say about 70 percent of our work is repeat business, so we do not need to do a lot of heavy marketing or to knock on every door.”

It works. Winning most of its business off referrals and solid reputation, the company has made its mark in a wide variety of industries. In healthcare, ATCG has won hospital projects around California and New Mexico, including the new 289-bed UCSF Medical Center in Mission Bay, California. ATCG recently built more than 400,000 feet of space in Redwood City, California for biotech firm PDL BioPharma, and a new laboratory space for pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.

Since its inception, ATCG has overseen numerous projects at UCSF, Kaiser Permanente, and Lockheed Martin. The firm is currently managing the $180 million UCSF Cardiovascular Research Building and the expansion of Westmont college in Santa Barbara, California.

ATCG has four offices in the United States, plus international offices in Thailand, Australia, and Singapore. In every project, the company can oversee master design, construction documentation, power systems, green energy conservation, IT recommendations, technical design, and even relocation.

Energized, educated employees

Whether overseeing an advanced, reliable mission-critical project like the 100,000 square foot Qualcomm facility in San Jose, or smaller projects like school renovations, ATCG is committed to quality service for all its clients. “That’s usually hard to find in our industry, because of all the cost pressure and fluctuations in the economy,” Fini says. “We’ve been able to give solid service for almost 21 years, it does not matter how big or small the projects are.”

To keep service standards high, ATCG management invests a lot of energy in training and listening to its staff. Each month, the company holds training sessions for each internal sector to cover latest industry trends and developments. ATCG will readily send employees outside for external training, and then regularly asks them to share what we have learned with the rest of the company.

Every summer, ATCG forms an education partnership with interns, allowing them to work and learn part-time with the company, without a binding commitment to return following the completion of their studies. In return, the company stays up-to-date with the latest university-level academic and research developments.

“Training both in-house and outside, along with interfacing with the education at universities and has helped us stay on top of our business,” Fini says. “Also, with being in Silicon Valley, we are so close to the most advanced systems being developed.”

As a result, in April 2007, the San Francisco Business Times named ATCG its 31st best place to work in the Bay Area, for companies with 101-150 employees. “The diversity of our projects has been pretty helpful in giving staff opportunities to work in a variety of environments as opposed to one cookie cutter type of design or project over and over again,” Senior Principal of Technology Rich Garrison says. “There is quite a bit of diversity, which really helps with staff retention as well.”

Diverse future

Like most companies, ATCG has an eye on the turbulent economy as it plans its strategy over the coming years. By diversifying into an array of industry sectors, and with such a wide variety of expertise and services, Fini thinks the company is well-prepared to ride out the storm.

“As the economy changes, our focus -- especially in the US, in California and Silicon Valley -- is really on adjusting ourselves towards the sectors where there are going to be more projects and more opportunities,” Fini says.

Conversely, he lists high housing costs in Silicon Valley as a difficult deterrent to recruiting and retaining top-quality employees. But the keys to success are simple -- shrewd decision making and avoiding over-ambition. “It’s just about keeping the client happy, using them as a reference and then going to the next client and doing the same thing,” Fini says.