Editor’s Note: Many APDSP members know Chuck Gremillion, who was president of his family’s company, A&E - The Graphics Complex, when the firm was sold to Thomas Reprographics in 2007. Gremillion’s long service to IRgA – including serving as president in 2005 – culminated in his being honored with the 2008 George K. Bukovsky Award, the highest honor given by IRgA/APDSP. Gremillion retired in 2021 from the Construction Career Collaborative in Houston. This interview, conducted with APDSP Managing Director Ed Avis, covers his time since selling A&E.
Chuck Gremillion
Chuck Gremillion
Thank you for speaking with me today, Chuck. You recently retired as executive director of Construction Career Collaborative (C3). What is that organization?
Gremillion: The purpose of C3, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is to help the industry create a safe, skilled, and sustainable craft workforce. While C3 focuses on commercial construction, the problem C3 is addressing impacts the construction industry as a whole. Over time, the construction industry has developed a “low bid at all costs” mentality. As a result, many construction companies have gotten away from developing the talent needed to attract, develop and maintain a sustainable craft workforce.
C3’s strategy to solve this problem is owner-driven. The owner of a project has the ability to determine what qualifications are required in order to bid it. We sought to have owners who would specify in their specifications that any construction company pursuing their work employed craft workers with OSHA certification; that all craft workers were paid as hourly employees who received a Form 1099 at the end of the year; and those construction companies provided skills training linked to a construction career path.
Over the past thirty years or so, the industry developed a negative image because working construction has been considered a job that one would take only out of sheer necessity. Working in the craft trades was not thought of as a career. The industry has to change this perception, that mindset, to help people realize it's not just a job, it's a career where one can make a healthy living while supporting a family. But to accomplish this objective, C3 seeks to change workforce development and employment practices.
How did you achieve the goals of the organization?
Gremillion: Well, the first thing we had to do was engage owners. We had to attract owners who believed in the process, believed in what we were doing. In the end, we had to convince owners they were not getting a high quality, high performing building, because many times those buildings were built with unskilled workers. That wasn’t the fault of the craft worker themselves, they just were not being trained.
For many owners it was a paradigm shift for them. They were so accustomed to low bid, low bid, low bid, that's how they've always done it, that this was a dramatic change.
We made headway with some very influential owners, such as Hines, one of the largest developers in the world, which is headquartered here in Houston. When we got them on board that really got the attention of the industry, because they're a private developer and a lot of people thought, "Well, a developer will never do that. They just build a building and flip it."
Well, Hines is not that way. They saw it very differently. They believed so strongly in C3 that a Hines executive served on our board and still does. We also had Brookfield Properties, JLL and a number of the large healthcare institutions engaged. The common denominator is they are all serial builders who recognized the importance of a safe, skilled, sustainable craft workforce. In total, we had 21 owners get on board with us before I left, so that was the first step.
And at the same time, in parallel, we were talking to general contractors, next in the food chain, to convince them of the need for C3. We had some general contractors who recognized the problem, wanted to do something about it, wanted to participate and even serve on our board. But we also had those who didn't want any part of it. I believe they viewed C3 as a threat because it represented a change in their business model, and they were quite comfortable with where they were. But in the end, we would ask them "Where's your workforce of the future going to come from?" Now, up until that point in time, many of their workers were undocumented and unskilled and the gates were open coming across the border, but the border closed.
And, even then, we were able to show people that a skilled worker does much more work in less time with less rework. And so, as a result, it requires fewer skilled workers, which enables you to pay them more. And for everyone it's a win, win, win.
Did you develop your own training programs for the workers?
Gremillion: No. We taught companies how to develop training programs. We didn't develop them for them. We taught them essentially HR 101. How to attract, onboard, develop, measure, and either promote or terminate employees. Then we taught companies how to develop skills training programs linked to construction career paths.
Were there parallels in your work with C3 and your time at A&E?
Gremillion: Yes, parts of it were very similar to our A&E days. For a long time at A&E we didn't train people. And then the light bulb went off for us when we learned about Total Quality Management, or TQM. We realized that if we were ever going to achieve our vision, we needed to teach people the role they played in helping us do so; which meant we also had to empower them, trust them to do their job correctly and successfully, which meant train them to work skillfully, to teach them what success was, what was good, what wasn't, what was acceptable and what our customers wanted.
In the reprographics industry, it was do the work correctly the first time, deliver it on time, and do it with a can-do attitude. That was us. So, we taught our co-workers how to do that. And when we started doing that, we saw the results we hoped for. Well, in teaching construction companies how to do it, they had to first recognize they had a problem. Once they recognized they had a problem, people would come to C3 and say, "Okay, how can you help me? Teach me how." And so that's what we focused on.
For people who are not familiar with you, tell us about A&E, your family's business, and what led you to sell it.
Gremillion: We were a pretty diversified reprographics business. About 50 percent of our business was AEC driven. And the remainder of it was small and large format color and black & white graphics. When we sold in 2007, we had grown quite a bit and we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 260 employees.
The company was started by my dad, Charley, and my mom, Betty Ann. They had eight children, five boys and three girls. The five boys all worked in the business and we also had a brother-in-law that worked with us. Each of the eight kids owned an eighth of the business. We had made the decision, back in the early nineties, that we would sell it one day. That was our exit strategy, because there were too many grandchildren to take it to the third generation. The harmony in our family meant too much to us to risk taking it to the third generation.
This gave us a goal. We didn't hide it from our employees. We told them that someday that we would sell. We were also an open book company. We were trying to grow our company and we felt like the best way to do it was to gain the trust of our coworkers, those whom we worked with every day.
I would meet quarterly with all of our employees and go through our income statement and make sense of it for them. That created trust, which was what we hoped. We did grow a lot in that period of time. But we were always looking for the right opportunity to sell. We had an architect on staff and he came back from an AIA convention and told us about BIM and how it was going to change how buildings were constructed, how it was going to change everything about it. And we thought "Now's the time." And so that was why we sold.
So what have you been doing since you retired?
Gremillion: For one thing, I’m on the advisory board for the development of a new career and technical education high school for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. The idea is that a child will earn a certificate like they would at a community college, but they'll earn it while they're in high school. It'll enable them to go to work right out of high school, if they so choose, but it also provides them flexibility if they decide to go college. The school is scheduled to open for the 2023-2024 school year.
I’ve also been serving on the boards of Catholic Charities in Houston and another Catholic organization called Paradisus Dei.
I understand you and your brothers, Roger and John, also own a gourmet food distribution business. Tell me about that.
Gremillion: It's a company called The French Farm. It's frenchfarm.com. It was founded by a woman from France, who is an American citizen now. Back in 2014, Roger and I started looking for something to buy that wasn't in reprographics. A good friend of mine from my days at the University of Texas said, "I think I have something you might be interested in."
The owner founded the company in 1998 and successfully grew it, but she felt like she had run out of the experience necessary to take it to the next level. We ended up buying 80 percent of the business and she still owns 20 percent.
We sell gourmet food products and cutlery from France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Our market is primarily high-end retailers. It’s been fun!
Do you still see some of your friends from the reprographics industry?
Gremillion: Actually, I speak with or text Mike Carter from Lynn Imaging and Deron Taylor of Drexel Technologies almost on a daily basis. Along with our wives, we travel together. They were here in Houston last May and spent a long weekend with us. And my daughter got married in October and the wedding was in Austin and they came for that.
And I’m also still engaged with our friends at Firepower and next month I'm going to Florida to help facilitate a Firepower meeting.