Construction company relies on foundation of trust

The commercial construction company has been building foundations and more in southwest Missouri for 27 years. Its site development division celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2004.

And just as quality buildings start with strong foundations, so does a veteran construction company, said Larry Snyder, president and founder. Snyder said his company was built on teamwork and trust.

“You have to have a trust and the confidence in each other. And it’s a team that you build with the owner, the builder, or contractor, in our case, the designers, landowners – everybody has to work together,” Snyder said.

Trust was incorporated into Larry Snyder & Co.’s mission statement about three years ago, said Lacy Emmert, who works in business development and is Snyder’s daughter. “But we knew it was important all along,” she said.

Equally important during the conception of the company was the then-novel idea that construction contracts could be negotiated, versus awarded to the lowest bidder. Snyder said he was laughed at when he first voiced this belief. “They told me that you can’t sell construction work. That’s what they called it – selling it. I didn’t call it that. We were just working with our customers; negotiating, building what they asked for, what they wanted, within a budget that they had set,” he said.

The formula has worked well for Larry Snyder & Co. The company has grown from two employees – Snyder and a part-time bookkeeper – to two divisions employing between 70 and 130 people, depending on the number of ongoing projects. Sales have grown as well. Snyder estimates that sales in 1978 were $800,000. In 2004, the building division reached an estimated $40 million. The site development division’s sales grew from an estimated $500,000 in 1984 to $9.2 million in 2004.

Much of the site development division’s work is done locally. The company did the site development for Chateau on the Lake in Branson.

“It was a 16-acre project, and we were out there two years. I think we moved over 100,000 yards of material,” said John Montgomery, vice president of site development. Currently, the division is finishing development of the relocation site for Meek’s, Loyd’s Electric and L&J Plumbing Supply in Branson.

The building division does more out-of-state work, with approximately 30 percent of projects in southwest Missouri. Current projects include Copeland Manufacturing in Ava and a hotel at Airport Plaza on Kearney and West Bypass in Springfield.

Strategy and technology

The building division boasts an estimated 90 percent of work as repeat

business that has been negotiated. The site development division’s work comes primarily from bid work, where many projects are contracted with city, county or state government. “When public money is involved, it’s a bid process,” said Montgomery, who estimates that 75 percent of his division’s projects are bid work.

The creation of the site development division in 1984 was strategic. “It helped us get building projects out of the ground in a timely manner,” said Snyder. After 20 years, however, the majority of site development’s work includes large-scale projects separate from the building division. Smaller site development portions of the building division’s projects may be outsourced to subcontractors. A key advantage comes into play when subcontractors are unable to deliver in time to keep the building division on schedule. Instead of having a project stalled for an unknown time frame, the site development division can be called in.

Technology has had a great deal of influence on Larry Snyder & Co. – and the construction industry – in the past 27 years. The company recently purchased a Global Positioning System that uses satellites to stake a site.

Advanced computer software also has helped to produce more efficient and consistent work. Both divisions use Timberline software for estimating and job costing. And the building division also uses Prologue Management Software by Meridian as a project management tool. “It does all our subcontracts, all our daily superintendent reports, tracks all your insurance, monthly billings, schedules, job photographs. The most important thing is that it has a structure that all jobs are identical,” said Bob Keller, vice president of the building division.

The success of Larry Snyder & Co. goes back to its foundation of trust and teamwork, said Cary Paschke, director of business development. The company’s strongest selling point comes from “our motto of building trust for over 25 years. It’s our commitment to developing relationships – with owners, designers, subcontractors, and most importantly, with our own employees,” Paschke said.

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