A Foot on Two Foundations
Commercial or residential, Hudson Valley Commercial Contracting & Management, LLC delivers results
Call him Mr. Best Practices or “structurally multilingual.” As Founder and Project Manager of Hudson Valley Commercial Contracting & Management, LLC, Anthony Lewoc, builder of commercial buildings and private homes, heads a company of blended expertise.
It began with houses in the 1990s, when he built for a retired architect whose firm was in the top one percent in the nation. Anthony was working for his brother and studying architecture in college. Seizing a chance to help build mansions—first in Woodstock, New York, then on Fifth Avenue in New York City, then in Greenwich, Connecticut—he fell into a whole new education.
Make that an up-to-date education. “A lawyer investing his money in property built a weekend house with every bell and whistle,” Anthony says of his cutting-edge curriculum. “In two years and with $4 million, the house was so smart he could use his cellphone to heat the pool before he got there.”
Anthony was getting smart, too, about building and its financial rewards. After three years of college, as his friends finished degrees in engineering, he left school to build a construction company, mixing residential with commercial work and soon adding retail. “I came across a developer in Kingston who owned a strip mall and we had a great relationship,” he says. “For 10 to 15 years, we did tenant build-outs for him.”
Building on Good Impressions
Construction savvy requires experience, and Anthony and his team spread across broad ground. By the 2000s, he says, his customer base was almost all commercial, culminating in his company’s 2006 commission to build the Emerson Resort & Spa. To understate, which Anthony will do, he was seeing the light. “I knew we could really do something if we got serious,” he says, laughing.
By now the voracious learner was reading and educating himself on company building. And his company was growing. Then came the mortgage crisis of 2007, ’08 and ’09 when, across the nation, businesses pushed their building plans to the back burner or right into the freezer.
“Every job had 50 people bidding on it,” Anthony says of those years. But Burger King was beginning its first renovations in 20 years, and his company was there and his team knew build-out. They could rally materials and workers, meet 60- to 90-day deadlines, and impress more fast-food owners in the bargain. Popeyes and Dunkin’ Donuts joined the client list, adding many more projects. And whatever the job, wherever it was, whatever strategic mix of local workers and company expertise was called for, the buildings went up on budget and on time.
They also went up farther and farther from home. “We wound up at sites towns away and then states away,” Anthony says. “Today, for instance, we’re five hours from my house building a Popeyes, looking at two years of jobs, each one taking four and five months to complete, ranging from $800,000 to $1 million, depending on the site.”
Getting Closer to Home—and Adding a Roofing Company
Home for Anthony and his company is two hours from New York City in Saugerties, New York. Anthony’s resolve now to also keep his team closer to home and to families comes as the housing markets are on fire. “The average house around us is from $280,000 to $600,000,” he says.
So, is Anthony’s company narrowing its portfolio? Hardly. Take the national winery franchise it just helped put on the map in New York. “Between this Popeyes and the last one, we renovated a 50,000-square-foot warehouse into a $7 million City Winery Hudson Valley,” Anthony says. “We built a wedding venue, a bar, an event center and a restaurant. Another building will become a hotel.”
The winery also serves as a showcase in point of the building company’s trademark value engineering on costs. The winery owner wanted a 20,000-square-foot, standing seam metal roof and had rounded up prices separately, the lowest of which was $150,000 to $200,000.
In a case like that, what does Anthony’s team do? “We don’t sit home and send a project manager,” he says. “We do the best for our customers, and then we do more. When we cost-evaluated the metal roof, we determined that if we bought a machine that takes a roll of metal and makes a roof panel out of it, we could save the client $100,000 on the job. We retained the machine after the job and opened a roofing company. I hired a manager, and opportunities are exploding. With today’s software, we can take an address anywhere in the country, measure the roof by satellite and know everything we need before we’ve ever stood in front of the house.”
Keep it Clear
“We know our prices,” Anthony says. “Construction is one of the only industries with such big fluctuations in bids. You can get prices for a simple roof or renovation that could be off by 50 percent. So we use practical sense on any job or estimate to get the best prices.”
And it’s back to expertise through experience. “When we do a ground-up store, we dig the foundation and contractors come in with nine different machines and use all of it,” he begins. “My people are great. They know ways one backhoe can do it all, and that’s how we think. When we work out of town, we always get three to four prices, and when the difference is high, we do it ourselves—right down the line, in any category or situation.”
Other keywords for this building team are resourcefulness and follow-through. Anthony’s just hung up with a client who will fly in the next day, eager to see progress, and Anthony will be there with numbers and results. Pressed to say what his customers like about working with his company, he starts with the obvious.
“We put the customer first,” he says, simply. “We have no problem cost-evaluating the job and explaining to the owner exactly what it entails. The more knowledge, the more information, the more bids, the better the decision-making for all of us. A lot of time we work hand in hand with our owners, educating them on the topics, the parts of construction, the trades, and more.”
The Bottom Line is People
“I’ve been around,” Anthony says. “I’m 52 years old and I’ve been doing this since I was 18, and I have a great team. We have been fortunate to be in the front seat driving the construction of a lot of great wineries, restaurants, hotels and houses for people from all walks of life, from wealthy to the ‘department of economically challenged people’—and the bottom line is people. We put our best foot out, no matter who the customer is.”
What every project has in common is the team’s versatility. “Right now, we’re building a beautiful 2,000-square-foot vacation home for some great people,” Anthony says. “We like helping them. We could happily do residential only, but we have a strong past in commercial, and we’re flexible to both.”
Can he say what he loves about his work? “Construction is self-rewarding,” he answers. “You see results, and you get to see the finished product. And it’s financially rewarding—with the right mix of countless hours, commitment and turning a schedule on a dime.”