Banner year for Fisher and Sons
Cohesive problem-solving, client relationships key to success for Skagit construction company

Text and photos by Chris Huber

From left: Fisher and Sons Vice President Chad Fisher, President Jerome Fisher and Vice President of Operations Dan Powers in front of the Fisher and Sons office in Burlington.

In a modest-looking office building directly across Interstate 5 from the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Fisher and Sons construction firm employees go about their business on a quiet Thursday morning. Between meetings and appointments, Vice President Chad Fisher sits in his office, his radio turned down. Hanging framed on the wall are two magazine articles – there by the insistence of his wife, Colleen – praising Fisher and Sons’ past accomplishments in Skagit County.
Although he is honored that the company is named the 2006 Small Business of the year for Skagit County, Fisher remains focused on what got them here – upholding the business values passed on through the Fisher family since the 1950s.
Sticking to the values instilled in them by their father, company patriarch Bob Fisher, has lead them to $58 million in contracts in 2006.
“We had the biggest and best year we’ve ever had this last year, in the history of our company,” Fisher said. “Volume was probably up 50 percent from the year before. And 2007 looks like it will do equally as well.”
As a general contracting company, Fisher and Sons builds everything from banks to shopping centers and furniture showrooms to food processing facilities. They recently completed the 30-acre Burlington Crossings shopping center, with Old Navy, Best Buy and Home Depot. Fisher said it is the most high-profile project they have done in Skagit County in the past few years.
Having built businesses for more than five decades from Olympia to the Canadian border, the company has branched out since the early ‘90s to places such as Alberta, Canada, Texas, California, Michigan and Wyoming – 10 states in all. Steadily increasing over the years, nearly 70 percent of its annual contract revenue comes from out-of-state projects. On the other hand, roughly the same percentage of the actual contracts come from Western Washington.
Although many of their contracts are outside the state, Fisher said their bread and butter, in the number of contracts, is in Western Washington.
“This is our area of service,” he said. “We’re venturing out, but this is our primary area.”
He said they mainly venture out with companies from the Northwest. They don’t advertise much and attribute most of their contracts to word of mouth.
“When I say we’ve worked in 10 states, it’s all been because companies that know of us or are based here have taken us to a facility that they’re building there,” he said. “We’re not going into marketing … you know, the one we did in Wyoming was for Alsop, out of Bellingham.”

Notable in 2006
2006 brought a larger number of retail contracts than normal. Adding to the Burlington Crossings Shopping Center, which was finished in 2005, Fisher and Sons constructed the 25,000-square-foot Ashley Furniture Homestore showroom. Across the freeway, they built the new 52,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Foothills Toyota dealership.
The highlight of 2006, Chad Fisher said, was the 210,000-square-foot – five football fields long and 140 feet wide – Railex produce distribution facility in Wallula, Wash.
On top of these well-known projects, Fisher and Sons completed the Skagit Valley Cancer Care Center in Mount Vernon and Bellingham’s Northwest Medical Center.
“You can’t ask for a better contractor,” Jay Ayers, president of SEBCO Inc., said about Fisher and Sons’ work on Northwest Medical Center. “They know what they’re doing.”
Dan Sims, owner of Northwest Honda in Burlington, has used Fisher and Sons exclusively over the last two decades. He said they encountered a problem in a building they did years ago and fixed it within two or three months. The fact that they took ownership of the defect or problem is why he said he comes back to them every time.
“What I consider the most important is the way they respond to problems,” he said.

“Signature-Quality”
Fisher and Sons prides itself on being on time and on budget, top quality that is done right the first time and close client relationships. In the line of work they do, meeting budgets and deadlines for multi-million dollar facilities not only shows their efficiency, but also their passion for building quality businesses.
“If, when you finish a product, no matter who it works for, when you’re done and you’re not happy to have your signature on it and you weren’t proud that you did it, then it’s not done right,” Fisher said.
A critical aspect of making sure projects are done on time and on budget is communication and cohesiveness within the company and with their clients.
“We’re very open and very honest with our customers,” company president Jerome Fisher said.
From the drawing on the napkin to the cutting of the ribbon, Fisher and Sons provides a completely seamless building process by having an in-house architecture/design team that works closely with the construction crews. Chad Fisher said it is a unique situation that many companies don’t have, but it creates a culture of teamwork and vision, rather than confusion and disconnectedness between design and construction.
“(We’re) a single planning contact, so the only person you can blame is yourself, so you better make sure you’ve got it all worked out for them,” said Dan Powers, vice president of operations for Fisher and Sons.
A key to their success is involving their clients, Chad Fisher said.
“As you’re building, you’re still continuing to massage the plan,” he said. “And as that’s going along, you’re involving them in the decision making to make sure that when they’re done, everything’s the way they envisioned it and the way we envisioned it.”
Part of involving their clients entails weekly meetings to update building progress, communicate problems and work out possible changes in the budget or production time.
“What you’re doing is looking, trying to understand their business as much as you can and some contractors don’t do that. We try to understand their business, what they need,” Chad Fisher said. “We do a lot of listening, to try to understand what could be good for them. And you’re working together with them to try and make that product work for their business. If you don’t know their business, you can’t help them.”
Designing, permitting and constructing a facility may take up to nine months, but they involve the client in every step until the building is occupied.
Beginnings
Fisher and Sons began as a small home design and construction company in 1954. Later, Bob Fisher joined forces with Harry Gunderson for his expertise in project management.
After Gunderson died in 1981, Fisher partnered with John Bustad, who had been in construction since 1947. The two eventually shifted gears from home building to focus on commercial development.
During the shift, Chad Fisher and Jerome Fisher, his older brother and current company president, started gaining experience in the family business. They swept floors and cleaned up from as early as age six. The brothers continued to frame walls working through high school and eventually earned degrees in business management at Washington State University.
Chad Fisher said neither of them planned on working for Fisher and Sons after college, but soon realized their role in managing the company with their father.
“I think we started to see the more sophisticated end of the construction process,” Chad Fisher said, “where our job, rather than pounding nails and actually out there building ourselves, was in the management organization of projects, working with schedules and trying to build precise, excellent teams to put together projects.”

Broader ownership
When Chad Fisher joined the company in 1977, it was still family owned. He said they saw the need to bring in talented managers to be a part of the ownership team.
“When you have ownership of something, you perform differently,” Chad Fisher said. “You perform the same way that I think everyone in this company wants to be; you want to become fairly well-known for a company that cares to the Nth degree, because, guess what, it’s part my company, it’s part Dan’s company, it’s part Tom’s company. It just makes better relationship building.”
Although two of the brothers, Jerome and Chad, still have part ownership in the company, over the years they have spread the wealth to many of the talented managers they hired. With 12 current owners, Chad expects to have up to 15 by the end of 2007. The intent is broader ownership and a sense of pride in their product.
“It’s being turned over to these capable people like Dan (Powers) ... and it’s becoming broader ownership,” Chad Fisher said. “It’s no longer, and hasn’t been for a long time, a family company.”
The talent they seek in management is seen in Fisher and Sons’ hiring practices for all areas of work within the company. They want to hire highly qualified people, he said. It may sound strange, but some companies don’t do that.
“Secondly, they’ve got to have the ethics that we have: being on time; extremely loyal to themselves and to the company; they have to have a passion and desire,” he said. “It’s a place that you would like to say that everybody comes here to work and this is their career.”

Staying strong
Overall, industry is turning toward more environmentally friendly materials, according to Chad Fisher. The basics – wood, concrete, steel – have not changed, but there are many new green-building products coming out, so they strive to use environmentally friendly products and methods to continue construction.
Although the housing market has slowed, Chad Fisher said the commercial business is still strong and looks to stay strong for a couple of years. They currently have 150 employees.
“We have hired more people in the last six months than we probably have in the last three years,” he said. “Because building is just booming, we still have been on a roll.”
Fisher and Sons’ role in building businesses in Skagit County is not limited to businesses. Every year, Fisher and Sons donates time and materials to build a project for a group in the community.
In 2006, they built a Boys and Girls Club play shed in Mount Vernon. In addition, they return a portion of their profits to the community through support of youth sports and social groups, such as the Kiwanis Club, around the county. Chad Fisher said they believe in giving back to a community that has been good to the company.
In the end, their success is attributed to developing honest, trusting, problem-solving relationships with their clients while upholding the highest building standards in the industry.
“They know that you’ve involved them the entire way, that you cared for their money, cared for their product, and you’ve helped them understand what they’re purchasing, and how they’re purchasing, and what it’s going to do for them,” Chad Fisher said.

Fisher and Sons is currently working on the 120,000-square-foot Transform Manufacturing building along Peterson Road, west of Burlington.