GE Johnson Construction Co., a longtime Colorado Springs business whose recent high-profile projects include the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum, the Pikes Peak Summit Visitor Center and downtown’s Weidner Field, has agreed to be sold to a California company.
DPR Construction, ranked in May as the nation’s 10th largest contractor, will acquire GE Johnson for an undisclosed price by the end of September. DPR will retain all of the company’s nearly 700 employees, including its management headed by CEO Jim Johnson. GE Johnson will continue to operate as a separate company under the GE Johnson name, according to a news release.
Both companies are owned by employees, so DPR is acquiring Johnson from its employees, many of whom are then buying stock in DPR.
Both companies hire skilled tradesmen in concrete, drywall and other specialties rather than using subcontractors for each part of a construction project. Jim Johnson said his company “wanted to align ourselves with builders, not brokers.”
Discussions about selling the company began in April 2020, when GE Johnson received an unsolicited buyout offer, Jim Johnson said. He narrowed a list of 10 companies that had expressed interest in buying GE Johnson to four finalists and he and the company’s other six top executives selected DPR from the finalists in June. The decision, he said, was based not on the sale price, but on corporate culture, business values, opportunities for employees and strategic alignment.
“This is good news for Colorado Springs,” Jim Johnson said. “We still end up with a great company that is committed to the community and bringing the latest solutions and elevating construction along the Front Range. We will continue to invest in the community — none of that changes. But we will have a contractor that competes on a national scale. We are a regional contractor today — to go to a national scale would have required more capital and people.”
Although GE Johnson had grown to become a major regional player, the company would have needed to invest tens of millions of dollars and expand its workforce by five to 10 times to become a national player, Johnson said. The deal also gives GE Johnson the financial backing to continue and increase its investment in technology, prefabrication of building components and “the tools we will need in 2030.”
GE Johnson is among the three largest contractors in Colorado, generating $700 million in revenue in 2020, down from a peak of $900 million; it ranked 164th largest in the nation by Engineering News Record. The company also operates a small foundation that will become much larger as a result of the deal, Johnson said. The 6-year-old foundation made $1.07 million in grants in 2019 for education, economic development, the environment, health and human services, arts and culture and sports and recreation.
Johnson said the company will continue its sponsorship, contributions and volunteer efforts by its employees on behalf of many organizations and charitable causes. Those efforts include organizing food drives throughout its territory and collecting more than 1,100 backpacks in recent weeks for disadvantaged students at schools in the five states where it operates — Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming.
Johnson, 60, who took over the company when his father died of complications from cancer, said he will remain with the company for three years with annual mutual options to extend the agreement until he “figures out what is next” for him. He will eventually select a successor who likely already works for GE Johnson, such as one of the six executives that selected DPR as the buyer for the company.
“I have spent my career really working to benefit others — I really tried to figure out how to leave the company in better shape than it is in today,” Johnson said. “I really want this transaction to work out the way the sale of The Broadmoor did both times it has been sold. When you walk into The Broadmoor, it still feels like The Broadmoor. Why can’t we make this (transaction) feel like that?”
Gil Johnson, whose family had operated construction companies since the early 1900s, started the company named for him in 1961 after working for construction companies in Kansas and Greeley. After working as project manager for the construction of the new Antlers Hotel, Hensel Phelps Construction, the company said he could either return to the home office in Greeley or open a new office in California. He opened GE Johnson instead.
The new company got its first job a few days later to replace a screen door at the Antlers that had been lost in windstorm. GE Johnson grew by doing small jobs such as partitions for a bank and a caddie shack at The Broadmoor before landing a contract to manage construction of what is Pikes Peak Community College’s Centennial Campus. The company built dozens of schools in the 1970s as well as hospitals and several buildings at The Broadmoor.
GE Johnson built the Digital Equipment plant in the Rockrimmon area, the Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts and the Alamo Corporate Center in downtown Colorado Springs, the Colorado Springs World Arena, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee headquarters, Children’s Hospital Colorado Springs, several high-profile hotels in Denver, several buildings on the Air Force Academy and University of Wyoming campuses and a football stadium for Kansas State University.
GE Johnson expanded over the years by opening offices in Denver, Vail, Jackson, Wyo.; Lexana, Kan. ,and Oklahoma City. The company also formed joint ventures with H.W. Houston Construction of Pueblo in 2015 and Schmueser & Associates of Rifle in 2017. Several major local construction companies were started by GE Johnson alumni, including Bryan Construction, Colarelli Construction and Nunn Construction.
DPR was started in 1990 in Redwood City, Calif., by Doug Wood, Peter Nosler and Ron Davidowski, based on the first letter of their first names. The company’s first project was a nursing home in California; a semiconductor plant for Rockwell International was also among its early projects. In recent years, DPR has built data centers for eBay and Facebook, a headquarters for Clif Bar and manufacturing plants for Genentech. DPR operates 31 offices in across the U.S. Asia and Europe and employs 6,500 people and generates $6 billion in revenue.
This content was originally published here.
