Lynden Contractor
Builds Sales by Diversifying

Renowned Dairy Builder Faber Bros. Expands
with Commercial, Residential Projects

by Michael Barrett

The sign outside the offices of Faber Brothers Construction Corp. in Lynden announces they’re for sale. Not the company, the buildings.

“We have outgrown our present facility and our long-term growth plan will not fit here,” says Rick Faber, who with his brother, Ron, owns the 14-year-old business. “We have five acres outside of town, at Pole and Hannegan roads, and will be building a new office and warehouse there next winter.”

Faber, currently at 131 E. Grover St., made its name in the construction business by building dairies — and not just little ones — but over the years, it has diversified into the commercial, and to some degree, residential fields.

“A lot of our work has been along the I-5 corridor, starting in Blaine in ’99 with Nature’s Path, the biggest project to date, and moving down to Ferndale where we did nearly a dozen mostly steel buildings at COPAC Warehouse Industrial Park,” Rick Faber recounts. “Another was Montigo Del Ray Corp., a Canadian gas-fireplace manufacturer, and we also did Cascade Prosthetics.”

These are some of the larger projects the company has undertaken in recent years: 100,000 square feet at Montigo, a 75,000-square-foot facility for cereal manufacturer Nature’s Path Foods and 30,000 square feet for Cascade Prosthetics in Ferndale. But the company enjoys working on smaller projects as well.

Mike Leland is head of Faber’s commercial division. “We like the small jobs. They’re good in-fill jobs. It’s good for our employees. We build lots of restaurants, insurance offices, dry cleaners and such, often in strip malls,” Leland notes. “We don’t want to be known as the guys who build only the big buildings.”

Faber Brothers has grown its staff to 35, including estimators, two company designers and support staff totaling eight in the office; 20 more workers are in the field. Rick Faber, the president, is in charge of the day-to-day operations, human resources, purchasing training, “the loose ends” and some smaller projects.

“I keep my ears to the ground and make sure we’re doing jobs that fit our yearly format,” he explains. “Mike handles his area on his own; it’s important in business to be able to surround yourself with very good people, allow them to do their work. Ron, who’s vice president, is not involved with the commercial side and stays exclusively with the dairy industry. Some of those projects take up to a year to plan out.” At the time of the interview, Ron Faber, 36, was in Yakima putting a new dairy together.

The dairy industry, after all, was where the Faber brothers got their start.

“We originally started with DeYoung and Roosma building dairies,” Rick Faber, 40, relates. “I started out of high school and was made lead man and then foreman, which I liked because it had lots of challenges. I did that for seven years and my brother did it for three or four years.

“A lot of people think a dairy farm is just a dairy farm; that’s true. But no one dairy farmer thinks the same; there are a lot of variables there. Ron works well with them. Nothing is the same as far as size and how these dairies come together. Each has unique elements.

“With dairies, the biggest thing we have to deal with are water issues,” he continues. “They use a lot of water, and then there’s waste-management and environmental issues, too. These concerns need to be satisfied.”

 

Market adjustment

Alas for the Fabers, the dairy industry went into a decline during the last decade and business began to “dry up,” says Rick. “The small dairy is vanishing; it’s a thing of the past.”

With that in mind, about 1994, the company began to diversify, first with residential construction, which it still does on a small scale.

“It’s a tight little market. You have to be really specialized, and in our case, that didn’t tie in,” Rick laments.

Then Mike Leland joined the business and brought with him years of experience doing commercial, remodel and tenant-improvement projects.

“In 1997, we started doing more industrial — steel buildings and concrete tilt-ups,” Leland, 46, points out. “The industrial portion of the commercial division has been very good for us, complemented by smaller projects here and there.” The company prides itself on doing it all — from design to completion — and not afraid to do the little things asked of it.

“We’ve had a lot of repeat customers who will call us to install a door or a window,” Rick states. “We do a lot of tenant improvements.”

So far, Faber Brothers Construction Corp. has been content to do work mostly in the northwest corner, with some dairy projects farther afield and some work even as far as Idaho and Oregon.

“I don’t think we want to go much farther,” Rick Faber says. “We don’t need to take on the world. We want to do a good job and be respected as a good, solid, viable company that delivers what it says it will and encompasses many things, large and small.”