Small town company makes national impact in construction projects

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Passing Anzar High School on the way in or out of San Juan Bautista, drivers might only barely register the huge concrete-and-steel panels lined up in the yard across the street, standing on end like so many huge dominoes waiting for a nudge to set them tumbling. For more than 45 years, similar panels designed and built by Willis Construction have graced a wide range of major architectural projects.

It might be expected that the company’s corporate biography, published in 2017, would be packed with photos of these feats of design execution, such as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures building in Los Angeles, Oracle Park in San Francisco, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, the Getty Villa Museum in Pacific Palisades, an Afghan Village created for military exercises at Camp Pendleton or one closer to home, Christopher High School in Gilroy.

Those photos are there, but in the back of the book. The first half of “40 Years Celebrating Willis Construction” is dedicated to photographs and detailed profiles of the 47 employees working for the company at the time, who Willis describes in the book as his “greatest assets.” 

And Willis’s devotion to his workers is why the company is 100% employee-owned today.

“There were several wealthy dot-com guys,” he said, “that thought they should own the company that built the Giants’ ballpark. It dawned on me that whoever bought the company would take away a lot of the benefits that we had for our employees and use that to pay me.” 

Instead, Willis set up a system of paying bonuses and profit sharing, encouraging the workers to buy tax-free stock in the company. Over time, the benefits increased, and some employees have been able to retire with actual wealth.

The transition was done gradually using the company’s profits, without taking on outside loans. Willis made the change without consulting his employees. He said it took them some time to understand what was happening.

“I think the nature of people is to be a little suspicious of ownership and management,” he said. “But they became believers when they saw it actually happen. One of the things I’m proud of is that we’ve made millionaires out of former strawberry pickers.”

Willis graduated from San Jose State with a degree in civil engineering in 1977 and began working at a precast concrete company. 

“I’ve always liked to build things,” he said, “and it was the highest paying job I could find. I bought it out after 15 months. 

Willis Construction was founded in 1978 with only a $400 investment. The company was first based in two locations in San Jose and built storage facilities. When he could afford to buy property, he moved the company to Gilroy and, outgrowing the facilities a decade later, moved to San Juan in 1989.

Company president and project executive Marcus Gray joined Willis in 2005, a year after graduating from San Jose State. He said there are only two companies left in California, including Willis, that produce prefabricated concrete building facades.

“The services we provide are not only the manufacturing,” Gray said, “but also the product design. An architect conveys their vision of what they want, then relies on our expertise to help them evolve the design to be consistent with the vision and make it constructible.”

He said the company manufactures three products that can be made with a wide variety of finishes: traditional architectural precast, which is concrete with rebar; glass fiber reinforced concrete, which is a one-inch thick concrete skin on a steel frame; and thin shell concrete, which is a hybrid of the two.

“Once we get through the whole design and pre-construction phase,” Gray said, “we develop our own drawings. Everything is done in house. There’s six to nine months before we even get to manufacturing the product.” 

Everything needed for a project is fabricated in San Juan or at a second facility in Tecate, Mexico. It’s very precise work. Willis said that very few of the pieces they make for a given facade will be identical.

“We have to design every single piece of steel, every rod, every weld, and we have to draw it,” Willis said. We have to figure out everything, and it’s complicated. It has to fit and go on the building. If it doesn’t, that’s probably a $30,000 panel we have to make over again.”

A variety of materials are used to make the molds, ranging from high-density epoxy-covered styrofoam cut with a computer-controlled machine which reproduces the design, to wooden molds and rubber molds cast from full-sized prototypes of the finished piece.

The choice of mold material depends on the specific requirements of the panel being cast, such as its complexity, the desired finish and the number of times the mold will be used.

Gray said that 360 unique molds were created to cast the 2,500 panels for the Broad Museum, an exceptionally complicated project. And they needed to fit together with an eighth-of-an-inch tolerance. 

The project received the 2015 Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute National Merit Award.

Some specifications are unique to each project and are founded on the guidelines that govern the industry.

“The quality control department,” Gray said, “goes throughout the plant at various stages of the process to confirm that the product we’re producing is in alignment and satisfying the project specifications and industry guidelines.”

Concrete is custom-produced for each job to match the project’s desired final appearance. The company develops every specification with the architect and the construction team.

When a client specifies a particular color, the company makes a range of samples that vary in tone and sandblasting depth, providing a common textured finish. They can also produce polished concrete that resembles stone.

“We make everything from scratch,” Willis said. “We figure out how much sand, cement, rock, gravel and chemicals to use, how to mix it, how to get into form, consolidate it, cure it and get it out of the mold.”

Willis said this ability to offer a diverse palette of colors and finishes, a key aspect of their service, allows them to meet the aesthetic requirements of different architectural projects.

The concrete is rigorously tested for strength using a flexural testing machine, which applies to the sample until it breaks, allowing the company to determine its strength and resilience.

“The sample is made out of the same exact materials at the same time as a panel,” Willis said, “then we cut it up and test it so we know exactly what is in every panel.”

The cast panels can be enormous and heavy. A 10-foot-by-30-foot DFRC panel weighs approximately 6,000 pounds. Willis has made panels as large as 12 feet by 50 feet, and some pieces have weighed as much as 80,000 pounds.

Adding to the weight, the panels are mounted on steel frames and most often shipped with insulation applied and windows installed. Because Willis does not cast panels on-site, the size of the panels is limited by what is allowed to be transported along a given road.

Willis says that he personally enjoys building projects that are complicated, but he says he values people over projects. 

“I love the people that we work with,” he said. “This business doesn’t exist without the people and the family culture we created. Interacting with people—that’s where things really come to life.”

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