Thomas Crowther, President & CEO, The Crowther Group

Thomas Crowther, managing partner of commercial general contractor The Crowther Group, talked to Invest: about the opportunities that growth in North Texas bring for the company. He underlined how the arrival of more people to Dallas will spur demand for the healthcare, education, retail, and industrial real estate that the company plans to leverage, and outlined some of the challenges that the construction sector faces.

What significant milestones did The Crowther Group achieve in the past year?

It is no surprise that Dallas Fort Worth and the rest of North Texas have been seeing a great deal of construction growth over the past 24 months and that most construction companies are prosperous in this market. In our case, we have seen tremendous growth milestones in expansion to educational sectors, including higher education and the K-12 markets. We also recently finished our largest design assist office building within the public sector. That is a win since the office market has been soft over the past 24 months. We are also bullish on data centers, light industrial, and warehouse flex spaces as we see opportunities starting to come online with interest rates improving. 

Our teams are ensuring that we have a vision and strategy to execute in North Texas’s complex public, city, and county construction sector. This sector requires a sophisticated type of risk mitigation construction where remodels, additions, and new ground up projects are highly visible on active campuses. We feel we have made significant milestones in navigating these spaces. 

What makes North Texas an ideal region for The Crowther Group’s operations?

We are fortunate in North Texas because we are centrally located, have great access through the airport, a good cost of living, and a diverse business market. There are also good school districts, healthcare systems, technology corridors, and a lot of logistics and distribution coming to the market. Additionally, Texas is a friendly state for businesses. Those factors make us a rich region.

Economists project a 75% growth spike in Texas. As a construction company, that means more infrastructure, including roads and bridges. Moreover, the growth expansions will require basic essential goods for local communities, including healthcare, retail, education, industrial, data, and other sectors that we focus on. For instance, a major healthcare campus with UT Southwest and Texas Children’s Hospital, and a convention center, are coming online in the next 24 months. There is also work at the airport, multibillion-dollar education bonds are being passed with numerous school districts, and the data center and tech industries are expanding in North Texas. 

How do the construction projects of The Crowther Group impact the communities in North Texas?

Everything that we do as a company is community-focused and driven. We not only build great buildings, but we also build partnerships. What makes us unique is our focus on three components. First, we hire people from North Texas communities. Second, we like to ensure that our people serve within their communities, whether that means going to church, having kids in local school districts, or buying from the retailers that we build with. Third, we offer value to clients by delivering projects on time, safely, and at good, reasonable costs. 

We also tend to focus on sectors that are connected to our communities, such as healthcare, education, offices, and retail. We are excited about the recent award of a new natatorium and gymnasium for the Dallas Independent School District that is coming online. Our senior project manager is a graduate of Dallas ISD, and our assigned accounting coordinator’s kids attend that district’s schools. That means the project is connected to our employees personally as well as from a community and an investment standpoint. We look to build such projects and connect with our clients at a higher level than our competition.

What is the strategy of The Crowther Group to fill the skills gaps in the construction sector?

We have started working with early collegiate high schools and in P-TECH partnerships. When we go to university campuses, we compete with anywhere from 50 to 100 other companies who are also there for students. Nevertheless, we are often only one of three competitors when it comes to P-TECH schools, which improves our odds.

We have been hiring aggressively from those partnerships because when kids graduate from urban school districts, they have an associate’s degree in construction, drafting, logistics, or a service-oriented field. Those kids have the option to go to a traditional four-year university degree path or to go into the trades. That goes back to our core values of hiring local people who care about the projects they build and who want to deliver the best solutions.

One of our assistant superintendents is a P-TECH graduate from a Dallas ISD school we worked on. He is also attending the University of Texas at Arlington to get a bachelor’s degree in construction management. That is a win-win for both him and the company. He is a young professional whom we can train in the Crowther way of doing business, ensuring that he shares our core values and vision. He is currently assigned to our K-12 team working on an education project for his Alma-Mater Dallas ISD, which means his perspective on executing highly is different from someone who has not come up within that school system. 

How is The Crowther Group incorporating technology and innovation to improve efficiency and client service?

We use technology to reduce waste, manage our risks with partners, collaborate more, and reduce time redundancy. With so much technology coming online, we look to step into technology focused on risk management on our projects due to capacity issues in a booming construction trade market. We recently adopted a pre-qualification software that allows us to be better stewards to our clients and understand subcontractors and vendors capabilities we are getting in bed with. It is vital for us to know the solvency, capacity, and wherewithal of our trade partners. 

That software will help us identify if subcontractors and tradesmen can deliver on the projects, while executing ongoing work they have in place, which projects tradesmen have coming online in the next few months, and whether they have any safety or financial issues we should be aware of. That helps us know if subcontractors and trade partners have the resources to execute projects we are negotiating within the agreed time frame. Our clients lean on us to be stewards of their resources and capital, so we must identify partners that can perform exceptionally.

We are also using AI. For instance, Read AI helps with our meetings’ minutes. Instead of having project engineers and coordinators take those minutes, that tool takes and distributes them, which saves time. We also use collaborative systems like Bluebeam that allows project stakeholders from architects to owners, engineers, subcontractors, and general contractors to communicate from anywhere. In addition to technology, we still like to stay connected personally to our trade partners, meet and talk with them, and fellowship with them. In Texas, people still like the value add of doing business the old-fashioned way, over a handshake or lunch. With technology, we work to not to lose that personal touch.

What are the top priorities and growth plans of The Crowther Group in North Texas?

Over the next five to 10 years, we will focus on building upon what we are doing in education. We are also excited now that interest rates are projected to come down as we believe there is a lot of pent-up demand for logistics and other industries. There are also needs in healthcare because of the aging population. Additionally, Texas and DFW will be a hub for technology and data centers, including flex-based data centers, so we aim to do more in those spaces. 

The main challenge is to stay focused on our business, execute our plan, and be intentional with every step that we take. We want to have controlled incremental growth as new businesses and competitors are coming into the market. Not many companies can live, build, and work here while offering value to clients, so we must focus on the factors that keep us successful. We also intend to be cautious about the risk that will come with growth. There is so much work in the market that we choose to be dogmatic on focusing on the work that we can execute at a high level and aligning with clients that share our core values.