U.S. Concrete Inc.
331 N. Main St.
Euless 76039
817-835-4105
NASDAQ: USCR
www.us-concrete.com
2016 Revenues: $1.17 billion
The way Bill Sandbrook sees it, if a wall is going to be built, it might as well be built using concrete from his company.
Nothing political, just simple business, said the CEO of U.S. Concrete in Euless.
“It’s simply another job to supply concrete in an area where we have expertise,” Sandbrook said.
Sandbrook was, of course, referring to the border wall between the United States and Mexico that President Donald Trump promised his supporters during the campaign.
Sandbrook can speak with confidence, having built a track record that includes turning U.S. Concrete from a bankrupt company to one that is turning a profit with a stock price in the upper 60s. It also has a reputation for taking on challenges other companies might turn from.
“Look at the Metroplex. You can see how busy DFW is,” Sandbrook said. “The more difficult the project, the more people turn to us.”
Trump’s budget proposal seeks $2.6 billion for border security technology, including money to design and build a wall along the southern border. He repeatedly promised voters during the campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall, a notion that Mexican officials have rejected. Estimates for the cost of a border wall range from $1 million to more than $20 million per mile. U.S. Concrete is among many companies that have signed on to build the wall.
U.S. Concrete is used to big projects. The company has provided concrete for such projects as World Trade Center 1 in New York, the Oakland Bay Bridge, Levi’s Stadium (home of the San Francisco 49ers), the Bay Hill Bridge in New Jersey, the Goethals Bridge in New York, LaGuardia Airport projects and more.
His company has over 400 trucks in the five boroughs of New York City, Sandbrook said. He added they have 17 company plants in the city, while the most any other company has is two or three.
“The harder the project, the one that can accomplish it best will get the business,” he said. “It’s that simple, and there’s not that many people who can say that.
“It’s a nightmare getting around New York in a car, much less in a Redi-Mix truck.
Among the company’s more local projects are the Toyota headquarters, Legacy West, J.P. Morgan headquarters and the Union, he said. Sandbrook is a 1979 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in management he spent 13 years in the Army.
He earned four master’s degrees while in the service, taught at West Point, served as a social aide to President Ronald Reagan and earned his professional engineer’s license (PE) in industrial engineering.
Sandbrook joined Tilcon New York as vice president in 1992 and became president and CEO three years later. In 1996, Tilcon was acquired by Oldcastle Materials.
In recognition of his efforts at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, bombing of the World Trade Center, he was named the Rockland County, New York, 2002 Business Leader of the Year, the Dominican College 2002 Man of the Year and the American Red Cross 2003 Man of the Year for Southern New York.
He was appointed president of Oldcastle Materials’ West Division in 2003, later moving into a pair of CEO positions. The result was company revenues exceeding $7 billion.
So, when it came time to name a new CEO for U.S. Concrete, the company turned to Sandbrook in 2011. Why did he take the job?
“There’s a lot of heavy material companies in the U.S. and most are owned by foreign companies. There’s only a handful of heavy material companies that are publicly traded,” he said. “I had a desire to be CEO of such a company. I didn’t want to get back to retirement age and look back and wonder.
“I’m motivated by a challenge. I thought I could build a successful company and resurrect it. I’ve been able to grow a great team and they are totally invested in our commitment and growth.”
In five years under Sandbrook the company’s revenues have grown from about $400 million to $1.2 billion, he said. In the company’s most recent quarter, consolidated revenue increased 22.1 percent from a year earlier, to $299.1 million.
“The underlying demand trends in metropolitan New York, the San Francisco Bay area, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Washington, D.C., continue to be extremely robust and we have strategically positioned ourselves in each of these markets to deliver solid earnings growth irrespective of fluctuating levels of federal stimulus or underlying infrastructure funding,” he said when announcing the first quarter results.
Among Sandbrook’s first moves was to shift the headquarters from a site in Houston that cost more than half a million dollars a year to Euless, where he said tax incentives basically gave them free rent for a couple of decades.
“It was a no-brainer,” Sandbrook said.
Just as he believes his company would be the obvious choice to supply concrete for the wall, if indeed Trump is able to follow through on his promise.
“We’re anti-political on this, just like the World Trade Center,” Sandbrook said. “It would be a project on the company resume in unique use.”