Cal Drywall’s annual revenue is now nearly $250 million (all in Northern California) and the contractor focuses exclusively on commercial and multi-family residential work. It has had the great fortune to have a hand in building Silicon Valley and to help build some of the region’s most iconic structures.

Its President/Owner Steve Eckstrom explains how he worked his way up in this family-run company. “Like all family members, I started working in our warehouse and yard. I was 15 at the time. By the time I was 16 I was a stocker/scrapper, driving 1- and 2-ton trucks to company projects, delivering material and cleaning the sites.”

“After college, I went to work in the field as an apprentice carpenter, working my way up to foreman,” he says. “I moved into the office as an estimator/project manager. When my father and uncle retired in the 1990s, my cousin Kent and I took the company over. After over 50 years with the company, Kent retired earlier this year and I now own and run the company.”

Eckstrom says business is generally very good—but not without its challenges. Just like the entire industry, the company is dealing with:

• Material volatility, including increasing prices and supply chain delays and constraints, and;
• Growing (qualified) labor shortage issues. “We are fortunate to have strong union labor partners in our market who train and provide us with skilled tradesmen and women, but according to the National Center for Construction Education & Research, approximately 41 percent of the construction workforce will retire by 2031,” says Eckstrom.

“Like everyone else, we have seen starts and stops over the past 18 months or so, but we are being invited to bid on as many projects as we were pre-COVID and many clients, both public and private, are moving forward with their projects,” says Eckstrom.

To Eckstrom, what he likes to see as part of the job is getting everyone within the company to buy-in to, and work towards, its corporate vision, which, according to him, is “to create an innovative culture where dedicated people are working together to make us the provider of choice for specialty subcontracting services and the standard by which our competitors are measured.”

Conversely, the hardest part of the gig for him is trying to convince clients that “low bid” isn’t always the best value for their project.

“Most of mid-to-senior people get it, but the challenge is that often GCs have their newly hired project engineers receive and review bids,” says Eckstrom. “Oftentimes, these are new or relatively new people to the industry and they don’t understand our scope, much less the complexities of details. So, while you break out costs for items that are required for the project but aren’t shown in the drawings, they give the job to a competitor who has missed or excluded it, ultimately not accounting for a cost you’ve covered and they will ultimately pay for.”