Ricardo Quinones, President & CEO, PQH Group

Invest: spoke with Ricardo Quinones, president and CEO of PQH Group, about the ways in which his company has leveraged innovation and expanded relationships to forge growth in the Jacksonville area.

What are some significant milestones achieved by PQH Group over the past 12 months?

We have recently landed multiple, substantial projects, and bringing those projects to fruition has been one of the most rewarding accomplishments of the past year.

Have you recently observed an uptick in demand for any of your services in favor of others?

I have seen an uptick in specific sectors, especially healthcare projects. Municipal governments have also been busy with numerous small projects. The private sector, particularly in multifamily, has been pretty thin as of late. Not many developers are pursuing Market Rate Type projects, particularly given the interest rates. However, there are still a lot of affordable, subsidized housing projects moving forward despite this.

Additionally, we used to work on a couple of projects yearly for senior living, but this sector has slowed down significantly. While all sectors have been affected by high interest rates and construction costs, senior living seems to have completely halted. Perhaps the market is saturated, or those seniors, who would previously look to these types of facilities as a viable option are choosing to stay at home with their families instead.

How do the company’s relationships contribute to providing successful project outcomes?

The manner in which private sector projects are attained varies significantly from the way in which we obtain work from the public sector. The private sector is about cultivating relationships over time and relies on word of mouth; however, in the public sector you must be consistent to keep your foot in the door. If you only go after a project once you hear about it, you are too late to the party. You need to be talking to people before the opportunities emerge, and you need to let them know your areas of expertise and how you can help them before any project advertisements are released.

What notable trends and opportunities for growth are you seeing develop in the greater Jacksonville area for the design, engineering and construction industries?

North Florida continues to be one of the fastest-growing areas in the United States. This triggers not only the private sector via single-family homes, apartments and retail, but also municipal government work with a focus on expanding infrastructure. I have heard that 2,500 people are coming to Florida every day, and a significant number of those people are staying in our region because Miami, Tampa and Orlando are already saturated. From that perspective, Jacksonville seems to be fresh and affordable, whereas those other larger metropolitan areas seem to be a bit more expensive. We also still have a lot of land available for development, where Orlando and Miami have to contend with wall-to-wall construction.

What do you make of the current master plans for mixed-use communities, and what opportunities do these types of projects offer for PQH?

It is a lot simpler to design an apartment complex or commercial retail area. Far and between are the opportunities to work on a mixed-use development. PQH Group has been fortunate to be awarded a couple of mixed-use projects in Jacksonville, as well as other similar projects in other parts of Florida around the same time. These jobs are all extensive, 300-plus units with many amenities. They are dense developments with parking garages, commercial elements and are highly focused on specialty features, like marinas and dry storage for boats. These types of projects usually run from $200 million to $300 million, so putting 20% of that down is an exorbitant amount of money, and it’s understandable why anyone would be hesitant to invest that sum in the current economy.

In terms of the economic environment, what are some of the challenges that PQH Group is facing at the moment, and how are you addressing these challenges?

Staffing is a huge challenge, especially attracting new talent and retaining existing workers in the face of larger companies making job offers with substantial pay increases to our employees. In the face of these challenges, we have both engaged the services of third-party companies to help find quality workers and have also upped incentives to our employees by increasing our benefits, holidays, vacation time, and matching our competitors’ offers when we can.

Given the evolving nature of the design, construction and engineering sectors, in what ways are you staying ahead in terms of innovation?

Artificial intelligence is the newest trend we’ve begun utilizing. There are a multitude of available programs that can provide writing tools. We can submit a prompt, and the program provides a starting point from which we can edit to suit our needs. There are also programs in which you can feed details about a design, such as the size of a building, the style, and how many floors, and the program will quickly provide two or three ideas. We may not use any of these options, but the tool allows us to come up with options quicker, even if they serve as a tool to rule them out. AI innovation is improving with time, and I believe it has been a helpful tool for our business.

What projects and developments will PQH Group be looking toward over the next two or three years?

Because we are not the ones with the funds, it can be difficult to control our own destiny. We provide a service, so a lot of the work is driven by our clients. These different entities develop their dreams and come up with projects, what we do is put ourselves in a position to help actualize those dreams. Regarding the public sector, we call our approach “planting a seed,” and the next steps include watering and nurturing that seed by maintaining relationships and ensuring that government entities look to us as a service provider for their projects. We’ve continued to increase that engagement with governmental and educational entities over the last few years, which was not part of our business model 10 years ago. In the past, we were fortunate that much of our work was private and came from word of mouth, but after the last recession, we had to think about the different markets we could possibly enter. Some markets are more prone to economic swings. However, government and healthcare are more resilient, so over the last ten years we have tried to nurture those clients so our projects are balanced across multiple sectors.