BNBuilders

Specialties: Negotiated work in the biotech, health care, commercial and educational sectors

Management: Brad Bastian and Jeff Nielsen, owners; Kurt Hildebrand, operations manager; Jim Charpentier, director of business development

Year founded: 2000

Headquarters: Seattle

2007 revenues: About $200 million

Projected 2008 revenues: About $220 million

Current projects: About to begin a three-school K-12 campus for the Muckleshoot tribe; working on a spec biotech office building for Alexandria Real Estate; tenant improvements for a 100,000-square-foot office building for Providence Health System in Renton; just finished a radiology department for Capitol Medical Center in Olympia and the first phase of Children's Hospital's research institute in Seattle

Photo courtesy of BNBuilders BNBuilders built this 95,000-square-foot Health and Wellness Center for the Muckleshoot tribe. The center has medical, dental, counseling, and recreation facilities including an amphitheater, a therapy pool and a gym.

Jim Charpentier said BNBuilders is training all of its project managers to use building information modeling (BIM) as a matter of course. BIM has been especially useful to the firm in its more complicated biotech projects, said Charpentier, the company's director of business development.

"It helps tremendously with the coordination of complex mechanical and structural systems,"he said. "We can plan all that early on and catch those clashes, those problems, before we ever set foot on site."

Charpentier says BIM should be considered on every project. He said clients of all sectors are increasingly familiar with modeling and are requesting it for projects. He said that includes the firm's public sector projects, like building a new City Hall for the city of Kenmore. Experience with BIM was listed in that project's RFQ, he said.

Charpentier

"I tend to think our ability there standing out in that technology helped us to get that project," Charpentier said.

Beyond BIM

Charpentier said some clients are increasingly wanting more than design-build or BIM on their projects. The next step, he said, is using lean project delivery, a planning approach developed by the Lean Construction Institute in 1997. It's been around awhile but is now increasingly being requested in high-tech projects, Charpentier said. He said a more integrative planning approach just makes sense with design-build and modeling.

"We are seeing it in health care, biotech and laboratory construction. I bet you'll start seeing it in education," Charpentier said. "It is just a heightened awareness and a heightened use."

Few economic worries here

Charpentier said the national credit crisis and the upcoming election have created some national uncertainty and that's led to a tightening of spending that has affected commercial real estate nationally. But he said investment in the Northwest is still healthy.

"I am very optimistic about what will happen here," Charpentier said. "We're still growing and this market's still growing."

He said keeping a diverse range of expertise at BNBuilders has helped the eight-year-old firm continue to grow.

"We're able to provide owners with a diversity of experience that has helped us to stay relevant and healthy," he said.