Patience Makes Perfect

Rick Beaver has three rules: communicate, deliver quality, and follow up with financial success. It’s an aggressive yet simple business model that he has cultivated over the course of three decades doing construction and remodeling. Now, the founder of Beaver Builders, LLC and his eight-member team are weathering one of the harshest industry climates by sticking to an additional rule: be patient, kind, and adaptable. “We’re really good at problem solving—a square-peg-round-hole company,” Beaver says. “We get the projects other companies won’t do—the tough and creative jobs.”

Specializing in commercial and historical renovation, general contracting, and new builds, Beaver Builders typically works in Denver and the surrounding area. Although the company was only established in 2004, Beaver himself has worked in various construction jobs since the late 1970s. Back then, he founded a small company that did framing, siding, and other small-scale residential projects until he moved to Colorado in 1981; there, he founded a residential and commercial remodeling business with a partner. His partner left in 1984, but Beaver stayed on until he began working for a large residential remodeling company in 1994. “I helped the company create a commercial remodeling division, which was my speciality, and we did quite well,” Beaver says. “But there was a lot of pressure after 2001 for me to go out on my own. Since I did that in 2004, I’ve been very happy.”

Informed by his years of experience, Beaver’s new firm specializes in being an all-in-one general contractor. “I prefer my customers to write one check,” Beaver says. “The customer is the key to this business, so my team and I focus on being efficient, clean, and responsive. All of my customers have my mobile number, so I can be there for them when they need me.”

Beaver Builders fields up to 150 projects a year, and Beaver doesn’t want this number to grow too much because he prefers a smaller-scale business model that allows for greater client-customer interaction. “I don’t want to be the biggest; I just want to be the most profitable,” Beaver says. “My main concern is seeing that a job has been done well.”

Because of adverse economic conditions since 2004, Beaver has gotten used to working with careful customers—clients who are more deliberate with their decision-making. Securing a contract can be more time-consuming, but Beaver believes it leads to more thorough projects, including the $18 million, 16,000-square-foot ACE On The FAX renovation in Denver that his firm completed in 2012.

“I had been working with the client for two years before we started the project, and we found this abandoned Art Deco-style car dealership,” Beaver says. “We gutted the building, leveled the floor, exposed the structure, and rebuilt everything from there, putting in new glass and having everything correspond to current energy standards.”

Beaver spends some time on advertising, but he’s less concerned with saturating the media market than he is with impressing the clients he already has in order to get more direct referrals. “Most of the time, when people are shopping around, they’re looking for deals rather than paying attention to quality,” Beaver says, “and I believe cheap work isn’t good and good work isn’t cheap.”

Beaver aims for competitive pricing with a greater focus on quality than quantity. “It can sometimes take a long time to make a deal with a client,” Beaver says, “but I put my customers and employees first, and that patience pays off in the end.” ABQ