A Conversation With ... Dave Robertson

You’re once again president of the Springfield Contractors Association. What’s on your agenda this year?
We have tried to look at the value of our membership, what that means and what we are as an organization. Our organization has changed a lot over the years. It’s been around a long time. It started out as an organization that was really there for contract bargaining and has evolved. We saw a need to look in to the future and figure out what was next.

Over the last few years, we as a board have spent a lot of time digging into what are we trying to do.

What have you found so far?
The group has focused the last couple years on bridging what we see as the older demographic. On one end, we have a layer of folks who are managers and company owners with the freedom to invest the time and experience to be involved in SCA. But when we reach back into our middle management and the younger folks who are integral to our companies and make construction work, they aren’t involved. How do we bridge that gap and reach all the way back into the university?  We want to not only make them a part of SCA, but also retain them in the marketplace here. Very talented young professionals come here, get educated and leave. Part of that is because there is no connection to the culture of construction in southwest Missouri. We’ve tried to figure out how to communicate with them. I’m 46, so maybe I’m getting old, but we communicate differently, act differently and network differently. One of the things we talked about early on was a creating a group – Generation Next – and giving them some rein to go out and network.

A couple years in, how is Generation Next going?
They are building that bridge.

What we tried to do was not, as a board, dictate to them what to do and how to do it. Then, they’ve just become us. We really needed to say, here’s what we would like to have happen, go build it. You trust them to do it and that’s a little scary. It started as a core group of young professionals and we gave them our ideas. They immediately came back and said your ideas are stogy and we would do it this way. They came back with crazy concepts and feedback we didn’t expect. We said run and they did. Their president sits on our board, they have created events and opportunity.

Kathy Baer has served as SCA interim director for nearly a year. Is the board seeking someone permanent?
That’s our biggest and first order of business this year. We’ve discussed a couple different things and still are discussing it. Kathy has done a fantastic job this year, but she has intentions, I think, of retiring at some point. We are working around that and evolving with it. We do intend to hire someone, but I don’t know what that looks like yet. We don’t want to rush it. We have to know where we are going and what the future looks like before we can really sit down with a potential candidate.

By day, you are vice president of sales for Prestressed Casting Co. Tell me more about the company.
We do large-scale commercial construction. That’s parking garages, warehouses, schools. In this region, we’ve seen a lot of tornado safe rooms. At (Missouri State University) we’ve done Juanita K. (Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts), both football stadiums, Glass Hall, both Hammons and Hutchens student housing, the Meyer Library and JQH Arena. Pretty much all of their larger, hallmark building from the 1980s up we have been heavily involved in.

The SCA bidding forecast found $278.9 million in projects on tap for 2016, down 13 percent from last year. How is the industry doing?
This year has been tough to predict. Before the recession, it was really easy to find out what things were going on. I have signed more nondisclosure agreements in the past three years than I had in the previous 25. Everything is a secret. That makes it tough to look out there and see what’s happening. I think things are moving along well, but I don’t think we are going to have these giant super leaps we’ve had the last couple years.