A Firm Foundation
Engineered Solutions of Georgia Keeps Its Clients Standing Tall
It all starts at the bottom. Without the right foundation, nothing will stand the test of time. That’s the philosophy Jay Eastland and Luis Cuevas had when they started Engineered Solutions of Georgia, and it’s the philosophy they bring to their clients each day.
Since they began their business together in 2006, Jay and Luis have seen their business grow into a success, securing larger and more complex jobs on their way to becoming one of the premier foundation firms in the Southeast. In fact, Engineered Solutions of Georgia was recently honored by Inc. magazine as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the nation, with an industry rank of 267.
According to the owners, the secret of their success is no secret at all—it’s a dedication to their clients and a willingness to take on any project. “Luis and I worked together at three different foundation repair and basement waterproofing companies before starting our own company,” Jay says. “We identified a void in the market. A lot of companies out there just functioned as a subcontractor. We wanted to get out of that mindset and focus more on customer service.”
Both men fondly remember the first job they had as owners of their own company—a residential project they landed in December 2006. It was a 100-year-old home with a failing foundation. They replaced the existing foundation and excavated beneath the structure to create usable space out of what had been a cramped and dusty crawlspace.
“When we began, we were heavily in the repair part of the business,” Luis says. “People had to repair their property before they were able to sell it.”
Property going up for sale was a big part of Engineered Solutions of Georgia’s business in its first years, as the economic downturn made its presence known throughout the country. Yet while so many businesses suffered from it, Jay and Luis say they hardly noticed.
“We started with Luis, myself and two employees,” Jay says. “We ran the business off my kitchen counter when we started. Even when we moved to our first office, the entire operation fit in one cardboard box. Now we’re up to a little over 20,000 square feet of warehouse space and more than 50 employees. We were already scrapping for every dime when the economic recession hit—we didn’t notice any difference.”
Solid Footing
A willingness to tackle any project has paid off for Jay and Luis over the last 12 years, and the growth of Atlanta has provided plenty of opportunities for work.
“Piering is our bread and butter,” Luis says. “Our real niche is existing structures that have settled. We stabilize them and return them to their original condition.”
“Atlanta has grown so much, everything hard and flat already has a building on it,” Jay says. “They’re building now on third- and fourth-choice places that don’t do as well supporting a building. Places with poorly compacted soil that tend to shift over time.”
Though Engineered Solutions of Georgia began with mostly residential jobs, it’s taken on more and more commercial work, as well as state and municipal contracts. The company is currently favoring commercial work over residential by about a 60/40 split, and has expanded beyond repair into new construction.
“We’ve made our business off of unusual, difficult, demanding projects. We want people to know when they have a mess, we’re the people to call to fix it.”Jay Eastland, Owner, Engineered Solutions of Georgia
Fundamentals in Innovation
Two of the company’s most impressive recent accomplishments were the Willeo Trail Bull Sluice project and Lincoln Terminal.
Willeo Trail Bull Sluice was a $2.5 million project for the city of Roswell, Georgia—an elevated boardwalk nearly a mile long crossing a tributary of the Chattahoochee River. The general contractor for the project was Integrated Construction and Nobility, Inc., but Engineered Solutions of Georgia was brought in as a subcontractor. Installing and stabilizing the boardwalk required a helical piering system for support, with a total of 1,347 piers driven 20 to 25 feet down into the bedrock, which is where Engineered Solutions of Georgia came in. Most of the ground the boardwalk passed over was mud or marsh, adding an extra layer of difficulty to the job, which ran from May to October in 2016.
The Lincoln Terminal project was a major expansion to a biodiesel tank farm, increasing its capacity from 500,000 gallons per week to 1.5 million. The farm is composed of multiple fuel tanks weighing more than 12,000 tons each, on a site that had experienced previous sinkhole activity. As a result, federal safety standards required the tanks be supported by piles driven down into the bedrock—at depths ranging from 10 feet to 60 feet—to ensure there would be no movement even if the ground beneath them disappeared entirely.
Engineered Solutions of Georgia took on the job—which came with a deadline of just three months—and provided the entire solution from concept to design engineering to installation. To make things especially difficult, the site received more than 16 inches of rainfall during the project.
Engineered Solutions of Georgia designed a hybrid, helical pile with dual displacement heads for use in the project and installed all 943 piers in five separate foundations in just two months, coming in under budget and ahead of schedule.
“We’ve made our business off of unusual, difficult, demanding projects,” Jay says. “We want people to know when they have a mess, we’re the people to call to fix it. We’ve got 150 years of experience in this building. We acquired a competitor in 2013 and absorbed some of their talented people. It’s unusual to have that depth of knowledge in one company. We’ve got some great people who grew up in this business and are very passionate about it.”
Jay and Luis don’t shrink from challenges, which has brought them plenty of work over the 12 years they’ve been in business together.
“On new construction, it’s a competitive market,” Luis says. “We’re challenged with sharpening our game to win bids and make money. On the repair side, it’s the complexity of what we deal with. Say a multistory building has settled a couple of inches. We have to return it to its original appearance, which means addressing not just the foundation, but any cosmetic damages, plumbing issues and all the other things that can go wrong. Part of our service is coming up with a comprehensive repair plan that addresses all the needs and leaves the client comfortable with what we’re doing.”
The Harder the Better
A reputation for tackling the difficult projects and finding new, innovative and inventive solutions for the problems that inevitably arise has led to some very challenging jobs. “We did a project at Georgia College to rehab some old dorms,” Jay says. “We picked three floors up between a half inch and 3.5 inches. It was an old structure and the college wanted to preserve it. We went in and designed a new jacking system and came up with a way to lock everything in place so we could get that much lift. We were actually lifting the interior frame rather than the foundation.”
“We did a similar job at Georgia Tech,” Luis adds. “They wanted to preserve an old building. It was actually built with wooden columns that had rotted away at the bottom. Usually we’d replace something like that with steel, but they wanted to keep the wood. We had to design a shoring system to lift them, remove the bottom, remove the old brick footings and replace the rotten parts of the columns. There was a column cap that the column sat on, with a pin that came through the upper floors and rested on the cap. When we started the project, we had no idea those pins came through the upper floor. The building was so old, all the plans for it had been lost so we had no original as-built plans to go off of; we had to react to changes as the job went on.”
Reacting to and accommodating changes has helped Engineered Solutions of Georgia grow from a dream on a kitchen counter into the thriving business it is today, but Jay and Luis are quick to point out their success is part of a team effort.
“The last thing Luis and I did by ourselves was write a business plan in 2006,” Jay says. “Everything that’s happened since then happened with the help of some fantastic people. We look at everybody involved as partners. When we’re on a project, we look at the generals, other subs, the owner, all moving forward to get the project done. I think that approach makes us successful. We like to say we worked for 10 years and became an overnight success. We feel like we’ve got some momentum and have reached the critical mass point that’s going to allow us to sustain growth.”