About Us - History, a look back while moving ahead.
| Encore Construction Company was organized as a Sole Proprietorship in 1984 by our founder Patrick T. Rainey. It was initially operated as a concrete foundation firm. Encore took advantage of the construction boom that Disney and other Theme Parks brought to Central Florida during its first year of operation in 1985. By the end of the year, Encore had 10 full-time employees and was incorporated in the State of Florida. Encore continued to experience strong growth and in 1989 landed a contract to build all of the concrete structures for the Sand Hill Wastewater Treatment Facility in Kissimmee, Florida. Soon, Encore developed a niche in this market segment and was simultaneously building the concrete "shells" for treatment facilities in several major cities throughout Florida, including Tampa, St. Petersburg, Punta Gorda and Lake City. By 1991, Encore moved away from subcontracting and "shell" contracting and secured its first publicly bid General Contracting Project for $19,200 at the Eastside Water Treatment Plant in Tampa, Florida. This was quickly followed with a successful bid to construct a waste tire recycling facility for Hillsborough County for $525,000. At the time, this was close to the upper limits of Encore's bonding capabilities. The rest, as they say, is Encore history. Dedicated to the ideals of fairness and building trust through customer satisfaction, Encore continued to grow, sometimes rapidly, until by 1995 sales were approaching $4-million annually. Also in 1995, Encore was the successful bidder on a series of projects including: The City of Spring Hill Wastewater Treatment Plant Expansion ($2.7-million project); The Citrus County Landfill Leachate Treatment Facility; and a wastewater treatment facility built in what at that time was a little known and new retirement community in Lady Lake, Florida, now prominently known as "The Villages". This sharp rise in backlog required additional project management talent and Mr. Lynn E. Mueller, P.E., joined the Encore Team as the Project Manager for the Spring Hill WWTP project. As of 2008, Encore had successfully completed over 40 projects for this single client primarily on a "Design-Build” basis, and continues to earn their trust. As for Lynn E. Mueller, along the way, he was promoted to Vice-President and became a partner in our firm. "The Villages" went on to become the most successful Planned Urban Development (PUD) in the history of the United States, with sales in the last three consecutive years topping $1.3-billion annually. The benefit this provided to our operations at a critical period in our growth cannot be underestimated. From Encore's inception, it has been a self-performing contractor with the firmly held belief that we were only as good as our craftsman in the field. A great deal of our success is owed to the fact that we have the most experienced and loyal field craftsmen in our industry. In fact, as of this writing, the first, second and third Superintendents we hired are still building projects for us and our clients. The consistency and learning curve provided to our company by a seasoned workforce has allowed us to confidently take on ever more challenging and complex projects. By 1998, Encore landed, what was at that time, its largest single project ever for the City of Brooksville, the Cobb Road Water Reclamation Facility for $5-million. The next year, we doubled our best effort, by winning a $10-million project for Pasco County at the Land O' Lakes Water Reclamation Facility, followed by a $20-million project in 2000 in Ocala, Florida. |
Our growth has not been without some growing pains, but Encore has consistently sought to deliver an ever-increasing level of service and engineering expertise to the projects we build. In 2001, we outgrew our office in Altamonte Springs, Florida and built and relocated to a new office in Winter Garden, where we are located today. We introduced state-of-the-art accounting and estimating software programs and further prepared to continue our role as an industry leader. The timing of our expansion was impeccable and in 2002, Mark Kelly joined our Encore Team as Chief Estimator, followed by Tim Behler, who initially served as our Senior Project Manager for a newly acquired project called The North County Water Reclamation Facility (a $26-million project in Naples, Florida). Today, as Encore Construction Company approaches its 25th Anniversary, it has expanded geographically into South Carolina and holds licenses in Georgia as well. We reported sales of $83-million during 2007, a year which again brought our largest project to date, The Plant City WRF Expansion (a $46-million Construction Management at Risk project) led by Nolan Hake, Senior Project Manager. Sales are forecast in excess of $100-million for 2009 with our largest project to date underway, The Peace River Water Reclamation Facility (a $75-million project). This project when complete will provide 24-million gallons per day of potable drinking water to a four-county area in Southwest Florida with an anticipated completion date in the fall of 2009. |
