In his 35 years leading Renier Construction Co., Founder and President Bill Heifner has probably raised his voice in the office three times.
“I can remember all three times painfully well,” he says. “And I can remember that within about 30 minutes of those events, I was back, pretty much on bended knee, asking for forgiveness for being such a jerk.”
Knowing how to treat people and cultivating long-term relationships are the keys to Renier’s evolution as a company — and a reflection of Heifner as a business leader.
Heifner certainly wasn’t expecting to head up a construction company. An industrial engineer by training, he had no experience in the industry when he started selling Butler Buildings.
“Then somebody asked me if I could put one together, like an erector set,” Heifner says. “I quickly looked in the yellow pages for metal building assemblers, and I found a guy here in Columbus, and I said, ‘I just sold this building, can you put it together for me?’ ‘Oh yeah, I can do that.’”
That morphed into another client wanting interior finishes on a building, and the birth of Renier in 1980.
The compan
y has grown to 45 staff members, who manage more than 500 contractors for various projects. Renier is as robust as it’s ever been, and Heifner has learned to not only say that his biggest resource is people, but to believe it, too.
Everybody has a role in the company, and no one person’s job is more important than somebody else, he says. And that includes himself.
“If you’ve got a big ego, you don’t belong at Renier,” Heifner says. “There’s been some people come and go that have had those egos, and I look around the office today and I don’t see those people anymore.”
Heifner says his role is to be a leader, more than a manager.
“I like to lead the troops into battle,” he says. “I just don’t want to tell them to bring their weapons with them and how much ammunition to have.”
In that leadership role, he’s found it useful to be a delegator. Heifner says you want to take the time to interview and hire talented people, and then don’t try to micromanage them.
“I know a lot of my peers over the years have gotten burnt out from trying to micromanage everything,” he says.
Changed dynamics
Like many construction companies, Renier faces a unique challenge post-recession.
During the economic downturn, drywallers, painters, concrete masons and other construction tradespeople became unemployed.
“They had to find work and they re-invented themselves as something else to put food on the table,” Heifner says. “So, a lot of those people didn’t come back to ‘the trades’ and the availability of talent out there is a challenge right now.”
The trade contractors that did survive have been reluctant to staff up. They, like many other companies today, are more fearful of what could happen.
At the same time, Heifner says Renier’s workload has picked up significantly since 2013 because there was a pent up demand for construction services that now has to be met.
Over the past couple of years, it’s been difficult to find qualified trade contractors — who often are spread too thin — that can deliver on time, he says. There are times when Renier can’t get contractors to their projects on the schedule that it wants them.
