Pride in Workmanship
Interior Experts General Builders Inc. packages trades to meet individual client needs
Adam Lopez, President of Interior Experts General Builders Inc. (Interior Experts), took a summer job hanging drywall at age 16 and has never looked back.
Today, 35 years later, he leads a commercial construction firm with 100 to 200 field employees at any given time who provide drywall and steel studs, rough carpentry, acoustical ceilings, insulation, and doors and hardware across the state of California.
Adam says when he dropped out of high school to take a job with a drywall subcontractor in 1985, he took pride in his work and encouraged others to do so as well. Within six months, he was managing work crews. By age 19, he started his first business doing acoustical ceilings. At age 23, he applied for and received his contractor’s license and established Interior Experts. He chose a name that aptly describes the company’s focus and expertise: interiors. The company specializes in retail build-outs, open-store remodels and office tenant improvements for tenants, developers and building owners.
According to Adam, his rapid rise to business ownership had more to do with trying to pay bills for his new family (he got married at age 18) and less to do with a case of overambition. “I was doing a lot of residential work at the time, garages and remodels, and business slowly started to grow into larger jobs,” he recalls. When the Northridge earthquake hit in 1994, Adam found himself suddenly with substantially more work. The 6.7-magnitude earthquake, which killed at least 57 people, left a swath of destruction for 85 miles and caused up to $50 billion in property damage, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
“I hired more workers to help do that work. But I thought, eventually, we’ll patch every crack in the valley, and then what are we going to do next? That’s when I made a decision to go into commercial construction,” he says.
Unique Service
What makes Interior Experts unique in the construction industry is how it packages multiple trades to create solutions for its primarily retail clients, including major national brands such as LA Fitness, Amazon and Grocery Outlet.
“Our strength is the ability to mobilize to just about any part of California to provide our clients with a package of services to fit their specific needs,” Adam says. “For example, a general contractor will reach out to us and say, ‘We’ve got these four stores we want to build—one in San Diego, two in Los Angeles and one in the Bay Area, and we want to team up with someone to service all locations instead of hiring an outfit in different towns.’ ”
Once Interior Experts gets the call, the company puts together traveling teams of trades required for the job. Work crews are typically two crews of four, for an average of eight people on the job. The company handles 20 projects at any given time, with each project lasting an average of two months.
Project managers located in the main office in Chino coordinate the work with general foremen who visit job sites and check in with site foremen and crews.
Adam says he houses the work teams in comfortable hotels or Airbnbs to make sure they are taken care of. “They are happy to travel because they get paid more, too. We turn the experience into something pleasant,” he adds.
To foster communications, Interior Experts uses WhatsApp, a free mobile application that enables secure and reliable messaging and calling. Using the app, Interior Experts creates various groups to enable easy dialogue between team members. “I’ll create one for a particular job so that the site foreman, general foreman and project manager can stay in contact with each other. We have a management group, a payroll group and a delivery group, too,” Adam says.
The unique structure and enhanced communications have led Interior Experts to attract key national brands seeking consistent quality work in multiple locations. The company has worked for LA Fitness for nearly 20 years. When Grocery Outlet called to say it was building 20 stores a year and needed someone to service the volume, Interior Experts was at the ready with metal stud and drywall, acoustical ceiling, doors and rough carpentry work. The company has helped Amazon build and renovate more than 30 different locations from San Diego to Sacramento.
Recently, Interior Experts helped an out-of-state general contractor who wasn’t familiar with the market and needed help building a laboratory. Interior Experts did all the drywall, metal studs, doors and hardware and acoustical ceilings for a 140,000-square-foot Thermo Fisher Scientific laboratory in the West Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Other projects have included retail build-outs for El Super, Seafood City Supermarket and Zion Market; open-store remodels for 99 Cents Only Stores, 7-Eleven and Rite Aid; and office tenant improvements for Pacific Design Center and ESPASSO.
Adam credits The Blue Book Network with playing a big role in the company’s growth and in helping it connect with quality clients over the years. “The Blue Book has been a valuable marketing tool for us. I don’t see how we could have accomplished what we have without their participation,” he says.
A Loyal Team
Interior Experts has built a loyal team, with an office/management staff of 20 people headquartered in Chino. Around half have been with the firm eight years or more. Most of its management team is homegrown, having started in the field and worked their way up through the ranks.
Francisco Flores, Vice President of Operations, is a good example of Interior Experts’ promote-from-within philosophy. He started as a general foreman in the field eight years ago and is now overseeing all field operations. “Little by little, I would get another opportunity,” Francisco says. “I started in the field and then got a chance to become an estimator, estimating projects with multiple trades. Pretty soon, I got another chance as assistant project manager, then senior project manager, then vice president of operations. Every member of the company has a chance to develop. They like to invest in people and train people to become better. When I saw that, I said, ‘This is going to be my home.’ ”
Adam’s son, Anthony, serves as Controller and Chief Financial Officer. “I grew up in the construction industry,” he says. “I started working here during summers.” From starting in the field pushing a broom, to working his way into the office as an estimator, to project management positions, he eventually found himself in the office handling the financial end of the business.
“I especially enjoy getting to work with my dad. Everyone here in the office has become like a family member. We’re all brothers and sisters in a way. It helps the dynamics in the workplace, and a lot of our success is due to that,” Anthony says.
Adam agrees that his team is very united, like a family. “We have a brother/sister relationship here. Everybody knows they can count on the person next to them. If someone needs to take time off for a personal or health reason, the person to the left or right of them is more than ready to step in and help out in whatever way they can,” he says.
The company has a profit-sharing program for its management team. But it’s the close-knit work environment and the flexibility that helps attract and keep employees. “We tell new people, ‘If you need to be micromanaged, this is not the place for you,’ ” Adam says. “We find and recruit people by word-of-mouth. We might not be looking for someone at the time, but if one of our employees knows a candidate that would fit our team, we figure out a position for them,” he adds.
To give back to the community, team members participate in the City of Hope’s Walk for Hope women’s cancers awareness event. This year, the company plans to start an internship program with a local high school. “We’re working out the details with the Chino Valley Unified School District,” Adam says. “We want to hire local youth who might want an opportunity in the construction industry as a trade or in management.”
“I dropped out of high school and went straight to work at the age of 16,” Adam recalls. “But I returned to school at age 25 and obtained my GED because education is important to me. There are a lot of young men and women who don’t feel like they want or can go to college and would appreciate the opportunity to learn a trade or get a taste of construction to see if it interests them. This will give our youth an additional option they can explore.”
And although he started in the construction industry at a young age, Adam has never changed his commitment to taking care of clients through quality workmanship. “I’m still the same guy I was more than 30 years ago. I like to take care of people—our team, our clients and our suppliers. We’ve continued to do that over the years,” he says. “We don’t really track our sales or use a particular number as a success story. Emails or calls from clients, thanking us for doing a great job or for completing a job on time, are our success stories, our trophies, and what we strive to achieve more of. So we’ll continue to serve our clients and make sure our teams are happy and taken care of. If we continue to do that, we’ll consider ourselves a success.”