On a recent afternoon near what will be the 38-acre onMain Innovation District, Chris Halapy, Shook president and chief executive, pointed to buildings near the Main-Stewart street intersection.
He gestured to the Miami Valley Hospital patient tower to the northeast, the GE Aerospace EPISCenter (Electrical Power Integrated Systems Center) to the southwest, and the Wright Health building to the west.
Shook was involved in all of those projects, Halapy said.
When you lead a company that was born on Dec. 11, 1926, you can point to any number of community projects.
“We’re a 100-year-old general contractor. We’ve built a lot of things,” Halapy said.
The company has about 200 Dayton employees and about 520 employees total tied to seven offices in Ohio, Indiana and Raleigh, N.C.
The groundbreaking for the five-story, 120,000-square foot building anchoring onMain was last October. With an anticipated opening in 2027, the building will be home to industry, Air Force researchers, academics and others.
Advocates hope it will lead what will one day be a mixed-used concentration of development, with an estimated 2,000 jobs, generating some $500 million in new research revenue by 2031.
Joe Mellon, Shook chief operating officer, called the onMain building “a marquee building and design.”
It will feature a glass curtain wall, with a roof design meant to be remindful of a wing span.
“It will definitely turn heads at that intersection,” Mellon said.
“Not your standard, four square corners, flat roof,” Halapy said. “It definitely has some aesthetic to it, some ‘wow’ factor.”
“The Think Dayton building will set the tone for the quality and character of buildings in the district,” the onMain master plan says.
An updated master plan was released Wednesday.
Shook will also spearhead the city of Dayton’s Ottawa Street water plant project, equipping the plant to remove “forever chemicals” — per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — from city water.
Ground will be broken at the 1044 Ottawa St. plant this summer.
“That will be by dollar value the largest project we’ve ever completed in Dayton, or really by single contract, anywhere in our company’s history,” Halapy said.
Toni Bankston, a spokeswoman for the city of Dayton, put the estimated cost of the Ottawa plant project at $350 million.
About half of Shook’s portfolio can be traced to municipal water and waste-water plants. But don’t tell Halapy those are boring, staid projects.
It was back in the 1940s that company leaders latched on to those projects as government-funded, recession-proof and reliable. Shook clients expect finished products to be assets for 50 to 75 years, and those plants fit the bill.
Few things are more fundamental than safe drinking water.
“It’s been good, steady, consistent work.” Halapy said. “Honestly, it’s still a niche, and there aren’t as many niches left in the world anymore.”
“Growth has been ongoing for decades, and with growth, you have to have that infrastructure,” Mellon said.
Manufacturing, education, health care, aviation and aerospace and data centers have also important sectors for Shook.
Nothing is completely recession-proof, but those sectors generally have been resilient, Halapy said.
Shook has worked for Sierra Nevada Corp. at Dayton International Airport and is completing a West Carrollton schools contract.
The approach seems to be working. Shook saw $473 million in revenue last year. Compare that to a decade ago, when 2015’s revenue number was $170 million.
That’s a revenue boost of nearly 180% in a decade.
Construction ebbs and flows with economic trends, but in the last 10 years, the business has made a lot of “positive progress,” said Halapy, who is in his 28th year with Shook.
The CEO said Shook wants to make its communities stronger, and that focus can shift from a building the company is raising, the floor of the hospital its crews are remodeling, to the trailer crews share at a job site.
“We’re proud builders,” Halapy said. “Generally, if you can draw it, roll it out on a sheet of paper, we can probably convince ourselves we can build it for you.”
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