Belin Jenkins, Co-Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed…
Casey Wendelburg is Vice President at Commercial Siding & Maintenance. Casey grew up in the construction industry, spending the summers working with his father. After earning his Architectural Engineering degree at the University of Texas, he started working full time at CSM. Casey is now Vice President and part owner, after holding positions in Project Management, Estimating, and Business Development. He recently completed his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Casey is now using this experience to establish CSM’s place in the industrial construction industry.
Business Profile:
CSM is a leading national industrial roofing and siding contractor. The company is headquartered in Houston, TX but performs non-union work across the country, even internationally. CSM specializes in metal roofing and siding, insulated metal panels, pre-engineered metal buildings, retrofit metal roofing, and industrial fiberglass panels.
We focus in the Power, PetroChemical, and difficult commercial markets. CSM has been in business for over 50 years and has built a reputation for completing even the most difficult projects safely with the highest quality.
CSM works both direct for the plant/end user and for General Contractors or EPC Companies. We are qualified to work at plants that have strict safety and qualification requirements, including Chevron, Exxon, Dow Chemical, and BASF. Our contract sizes range from $10k to $10 Million.
Tell us your story about how you have grown your business, and things that you do to add value to your specialty and the customer experience. How did this business begin and where is it now?
CSM began as a local commercial roofing contractor to an industrial specialty contractor that is involved in some of the major projects across the country. We hope to continue our success by continuously improving our People, Products, and Processes. Our industry is behind the “technology curve”, but we are trying to change that at CSM. We have adopted several technologies that help improve our three P’s. For example, we are building our company intranet that allows employees to access a number of searchable knowledge base items and training topics. This is has been a success in our company considering our workers spend most of the year outside the home office.
Also, I am in charge of updating the procedures for several departments. I have implemented a “wiki” program to assist in this overhaul. The employees that are involved in the actual task gets to write the procedures, rather than me writing procedures for people.
What makes you different or stand out in your industry?
We differentiate ourselves by placing safety, quality, and customer satisfaction above everything else. We have implemented a number of safety practices that are above and beyond OSHA industry standards. For instance, our workers must “tether” their hand tools whenever working above ground, which prevents tools from accidentally falling to the ground. We attempt to instill a culture of quality throughout the company. For example, we completed a project that was accepted by both our customer and the architect. However, the project manager noticed a couple items below our quality standards. Instead of walking away on the job, we spent another week on the job fixing a few minor mistakes that many companies would have found acceptable.
Although it may cost more to maintain a high level of safety and quality, we have discovered that this has built CSM a reputation in the industry that can be trusted. This has resulted in repeat business from our core customers.
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