With a growing roster of high-profile development projects in downtown Grand Rapids — including the $45 million mixed-used Arena Place midway through construction, the nearly completed Eastown Flats scheduled to open next month and construction slated to begin this fall on two other mixed-use developments —
Orion Construction has announced the addition of several new full-time hires.
The seven new positions are geared at increasing the developer’s job-site support, safety standards and office operations. Though Orion Construction has always offered pre-construction/estimating services for clients, President Roger Repkopf says the brand-new roles of operations manager and manager of pre-construction services at Orion Construction will allow for enhanced subcontractor relations and more streamlined field and office communications.
“In a continued effort to better serve our clients and deepen our bench here at Orion, we’ve been recruiting what we believe are some of the best people our industry has to offer,” Repkopf says. “These new hires all have strong backgrounds in commercial building, love working in West Michigan and bring leadership to our field and our management teams.”
Bringing its total manpower up to 35 from 28, the positions were all created in the first quarter of 2015 and represent a 25 percent increase in its staff size overall.
Repkopf says the now 15-year-old company wants to continue to grow and expand into the market, but in a deliberate way that doesn’t exceed its mid-sized status and, more importantly, doesn't sacrifice quality for quantity in both new and existing client relationships.
“We don't want to be the biggest in town, we don't really want to be 200 employees and running all over the U.S.,” Repkopf says. “We want to focus more on our clients and be that $16 million-per-year company we’re focusing on ourselves to be.”
For more information on new staff members as well as current development projects underway, visit www.orionbuilt.com.
Written by Anya Zentmeyer, Development NEws Editor
Images courtesy of Orion Construction
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