Nick Shaink remembers working for Professional Drywall Construction Inc. on the Target store in the Holyoke Mall, but he does not have much of a memory of the company before that, reported Emily Thurlow of BusinessWest. Shaink worked for PDC on weekends and summer breaks as a teenager, and he is now leading the company’s growth as co-owner and vice president.

PDC started as a drywall business but now offers many additional services, including metal framing, plastering and acoustical ceilings.

“We’re starting to get work that’s not our traditional scope of work — it’s our expanded scope of work,” said Ron Perry, co-owner and president of PDC.

John Kendzierski created the business in 1994, and it has worked with the local carpenter and labor unions since 1997.

Before Shaink became an owner of PDC, he was a trusted employee who worked in almost every role. However, he had always dreamed of running his own business.

Perry, a former construction manager, met Shaink through PDC, as he hired them for multiple projects. Perry also had wanted to be a business owner, so he and Shaink purchased PDC in 2018.

“I’ve always wanted to own a business; that’s always been a dream of mine,” Perry said. “So, when this opportunity came up, it was something that I couldn’t pass up.”

Since Shaink and Perry acquired the company, it has opened offices in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Malta, New York. Nevertheless, the business’ headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts, is working on the larger projects since the owners do not want to grow too fast.

“We want to make sure that we build the right team,” Perry said. “We want to make sure that we have the right manpower instead of taking the giant job out in New York where we could potentially fail. We’re starting a little slower and trying to grow responsibly there.”

Creating its Own Style

Over the years, PDC has built a name for itself in renovation and new, large-scale construction projects for retail, medical and educational organizations in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. The company also has a bonding capacity of up to $100 million.

Notable structures that PDC has worked on include the Bone & Joint Institute at Hartford Hospital, Baystate Medical Center’s Hospital of the Future expansion, Taconic High School and Wahconah Regional High School.

The company has also worked on more than 30 projects at UMass Amherst in the last 15 years, from its striking design of Isenberg School of Management to the UMass Design Building and the Newman Catholic Center.

At the campus’ Old Chapel, the company installed prefabricated, structural cold-formed metal framing, sheathing and roof blocking on the building’s exterior and framing walls and drywall on the interior. Workers also installed soffits, wood stairs, acoustical ceiling tiles and acoustical plaster systems.

“Our goal is to try to do as many of the things we’re good at under one contract,” Perry said. “It gives us more control over costs. It gives us more flexibility; it gives us more work on that job, as contracts are a little bigger. We’re able to do more work with less — that’s why we want our jobs to be bigger. We want to do a bigger scope of work.”

Drywall is a staple in modern homes and buildings in the U.S. and is made of two paperboards with gypsum in the middle.

Augustine Sackett patented the prototype for drywall in 1894, according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. However, it was not widely accepted as a building material until the 1940s.

Going a step further in the art of drywall customization, PDC uses a unique method to mill a perfect corner, called “origami.” Much like the Japanese art of folding objects out of paper, PDC’s approach enables its employees to shape a piece of drywall to fit a space more efficiently at the Springfield shop beforehand. Instead of using three separate pieces of drywall to make a column, they can use one piece of drywall, fold it and glue it together in the desired angle, then install it in one piece.

Perry explained that by using this method, the drywall is not only a durable solution, but also a more efficient one, as the profiles are prefabricated in the shop. “It makes our lives in the field less complicated,” he said. “It’s efficiency in the field.”

Moreover, as with most contractors, time and scheduling are of the utmost importance.

Avoiding Issues

About a decade ago, the annual drop in temperature also meant a drop in projects. But, for the past five years, PDC has not really slowed with the changing of the seasons. “It doesn’t ever stop,” Perry said.

In the months leading up to COVID-19, the company secured a number of jobs, which helped carry it through what were some trying times for other organizations. Despite the uncertainty, the company’s workload never really slowed down.

Fortunately, even as businesses across all sectors, especially in the construction realm, have battled persistent workforce shortages, labor has not been much of an issue at PDC, as the company continues to fluctuate between 280 and 300 employees.

The main obstacle during the pandemic — and it is still an issue — was supply chain issues. The variety of metal studs the company uses for projects has traditionally been available within a week or two. However, in the post-pandemic world, those same metal studs are taking up to eight weeks to arrive. That delay affects the schedule, which in turn impacts the company’s ability to forecast as accurately as it would like.

“When that lead time is eight weeks and you’re buying material that’s eight weeks away, and it comes and it turns out you don’t have enough — that’s eight more weeks,” Perry said. “And guys standing around is what costs us the most amount of money.”

One of the hardest-to-get products has been insulation. At one point, insulation, which was typically available within a few weeks, took up to nine months to arrive. In an effort to overcome such delays, PDC purchased multiple truckloads of insulation in advance and then had to find a place to store it all, hoping the job would still come to fruition.

“It’s complicated to forecast,” Perry said. “It’s a risk of where to put so much money.”

As for future projects, PDC has been awarded the construction of the new Holyoke Veterans Home. The 350,000-square-foot facility will include a chapel, outdoor gardens, and a pavilion for physical and occupational therapy as well as outdoor events.

PDC will be tackling the interior and exterior framing, installation of medical headwall systems, drywall installation and finishing on the project. Once completed, the $483 million project will house 234 long-term-care beds for the medically vulnerable veteran population. Work is slated to begin in the fall of 2024.

In the meantime, both Shaink and Perry still have their sights set on growth, and they are not being hung up on a particular volume of work, but rather focusing on sustainability.

“We want to grow the business to be as big as we can and as profitable as we can,” Perry said. “I’d rather do a little bit less work and make the margins that we need to be sustainable than to try to take on additional risk and maybe not make as much money. We’re finding that balance between growth and profit.”